Odor perception through network self-organization: large scale simulations of the olfactory bulb.

by Prof. Michele Migliore (Institute of Biophysics, CNR, Palermo)

Wednesday 1 Feb 2012, 14:30 → 16:00 Europe/Rome

Aula Touschek (Dipartimento di Fisica - Ed. G. Marconi)

The talk will introduce to state of the art techniques to model realistic neurons and networks, and will discuss their application for the implementation of a large scale model of the olfactory bulb. Odors are encoded in spatio-temporal patterns within the olfactory bulb, but the mechanisms of odor recognition and discrimination are poorly understood. It is reasonable to postulate that the olfactory code is sculpted by lateral and feedforward inhibition mediated by granule cells onto the mitral cells. Using realistic models of mitral and granule cells it will be shown how their synaptic network can dynamically self-organize and interact through an activity-dependent dendrodendritic mechanism that can explain the basic processes underlying mixture perception and odor qualities. Through real time simulations, it will be shown how and why the dynamical interactions between the active mitral cells through the granule cell synaptic clusters can account for a variety of puzzling behavioral results on odor mixtures and on the emergence of synthetic or analytic perception.