Program - Association for Chemoreception Sciences

6:30 pm – 8:00 pm BREAKBanyan Breezeway7:30 pm – 9:35 pm SYMPOSIUM – TRANSIENT DYNAMICS,METASTABLE STATES AND TEMPORALCODING IN CHEMOSENSORY PROCESSINGChair/Organizer: Brian Smith & Maxim BazhenovIsland BallroomOver the last decade there have been rapid and significantadvances in understanding how sensory cells transduce andrepresent information about odorants and tastants in a widevariety of animals. However, a similarly thoroughunderstanding of how neural networks in the brain process thissensory information remains poorly understood and muchmore controversial. Computational modeling studies usingrealistic biophysical properties and connectivities predict verycomplicated dynamics in these networks, which is supportedby a number of empirical studies. There are two fundamentalways that neural networks might represent chemosensoryinformation. In the first type of model the network rapidlysettles into a steady state or into a sequence of repeating statescalled an ‘attractor’. The qualities of the odorant or tastant areassociated with that final state, and the path taken to reach thatstate is not relevant. A second, newer theoretical account ofnetwork behavior in early chemosensory processing usestransient states. In these models information about qualities andintensities of odorants and tastants is encoded by the entireresponse trajectory including the transient path taken to reachthe attractor state. These models, therefore, are capable ofachieving optimal sensitivity to small differences betweeninputs, and to ensure reliable responses to repeatedpresentations of an input in a noisy environment. Thesymposium will bring together theoreticians andexperimentalists who have studied these networks with theexplicit goal of comparing how one or another type of modelmay apply to different animals and chemosensory systems inthe brain.S AT U R D AY7:35 pm #45 Frequency Transitions in Odor-Evoked Neural OscillationsMark Stopfer 1 , Iori Ito 1 , Maxim Bazhenov 2 , Rose C-Y Ong 1,3 ,Baranidharan Raman 1,4 . 1 NIH/NICHD, Bethesda, MD,United States, 2 Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience,University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA, UnitedStates, 3 Department of Biochemistry, The Chinese University ofHong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 4 Chemical Senses andTechnology Laboratory, NIST, Gaithersburg, MD,United StatesProgram in Detail | 77