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What neurons “learn” to smell a threat? A report explains
Which was published on our website on 2023-03-12 04:54:06 . And now to the details.
We use our sense of smell to assess whether an odor is safe or threatening. Researchers at the Del Monte Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Rochester in the US say they are finding new clues to how the olfactory sensory system helps assess the threat, and they have found neurons that “learn” whether an odor is pose a threat.
“The researchers are trying to understand how animals react to odor and how this affects their behavior in threatening social and non-social contexts,” said Dr. Julian Meeks, lead researcher of the study. .
The researchers identified a specific group of neurons in the accessory olfactory system that can recognize the scent of another mouse that poses a potential threat, and these findings are described in a paper recently published in The Journal of Neuroscience.
The first author of this research said: “We knew that territorial aggression is increased in a resident male mouse when it is repeatedly presented to the same male, and previous research has shown that this behavior is guided by social odors and our research takes what we know a step further, and pinpoints where this occurs in the sense system.” Smell, we now know that plasticity occurs between neurons, and aggression among male rats may be driven by a memory formed by smell.
The researchers found that neurons that work by silencing their synaptic partners in a region of the brain responsible for interpreting social odors become hyperactive and change function when males meet frequently and increase their territorial aggressiveness.
Threat assessment also comes about when an animal senses an unknown scent—for example, the scent of a predator it has not encountered before. Researchers in the Chemical Sensitization and Social Learning Laboratory found that the scent of a new predator, such as the scent of a snake to a mouse, caused the animal to engage in threat assessment behavior—not Acting “fearful” and not “safe”.
The researchers used video tracking to monitor the movement and posture of mice that explore familiar environments with different odors such as mice and other snakes. Wang and colleagues developed a hybrid machine-learning approach that helped them detect how mice respond to new predatory odors in ways that are unique and distinct from mice reacting to non-predator odors. These behaviors were neither frightening nor safe but rather an evaluation case.
These findings provide new evidence about how odors influence social behavior and what they may mean for survival, but this study also offers new tools that will move the science forward. We combined methods with known limitations to improve accuracy, depth of information, and human interpretability. For the data collected, we believe that this approach will be valuable for future research on how the mixture of chemical odors emitted by predators stimulates threat assessment in the brain.
What neurons “learn” to smell a threat? A report explains
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What neurons “learn” to smell a threat? A report explains
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What neurons “learn” to smell a threat? A report explains
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