Cichy et al. show that trimethylamine (TMA), a gut microbiome-derived metabolite, activates the receptor TAAR5 in the main olfactory system to regulate aggression and social dominance in male mice. Th...

All optical physiology in vivo provides a conduit for investigating the function of neural circuits in 3-D. Here, we report a new strategy for flexible, axially-decoupled photo-stimulation and two pho...

Odor cues in nature are sparse and highly fluctuating due to turbulent transport. To investigate how animals perceive these intermittent cues, we developed a behavioral task in which head-restrained m...

From logical gates to grandmother cells, neuroscientists have employed many metaphors to explain single neuron function. Chklovskii makes the case that neurons are actually trying to control how their...

Hernandez-Trejo, Ciuparu, and Garcia da Silva et al. report that the piriform-to-olfactory bulb feedback in the mouse carries multimodal identity and reward contingency signals, which are re-formatted...

Unlocking “universal smell” requires integrating key principles of natural olfactory systems: modulation of gas transport, utilization of non-selective sensing elements, chemical filters akin to the ...

YouTube video by Alexei Koulakov

The olfactory system employs responses of an ensemble of odorant receptors (ORs) to sense molecules and to generate olfactory percepts. Here we hypothesized that ORs can be viewed as 3D spatial filter...

Sparse connectivity between brain hemispheres is sufficient to learn and achieve bilateral alignment based on a realistic local learning rule.