Event Abstract

Pattern mining in spontaneous background activity from the honeybee antennal lobe.

  • 1 University of Konstanz, Department of Neurobiology, Germany

The honeybee antennal lobe, a structural analog of the vertebrate olfactory bulb, is a neural circuit dedicated to the representation and processing of odorant stimuli. It receives input from more than 60000 olfactory receptor neurons that converge onto 160 functional subunits called olfactory glomeruli.

A dense network of more than 4000 intra- and interglomerular local neurons putatively performs processing such as contrast enhancement or normalisation over concentration ranges. Projection neurons relay the processed information to higher order brain centers. As a first approach, a modeling study [1] has suggested a network topology based on the connection of functionally correlated glomeruli, rather than a purely lateral connectivity.

In order to obtain a more detailed picture of network connectivity, we set out to analyse spontaneous background activity in antennal lobe projection neurons. Previous findings suggest that global application of octopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in olfactory learning, increases both the mean and the variance of spontaneous activity in all glomeruli [2]. Comparing spontaneous activity in octopamine-treated and untreated animals, we aim at uncovering network effects that arise by inhibition or excitation of connected glomeruli through increased activity.

Extending our previous ICA-based approach for separating glomerular signals in antennal lobe recordings [3], we have developed a pattern mining method for the automated extraction of glomerular activity patterns. Comparing the pattern decomposition of treated and untreated spontaneous activity will be a useful tool for uncovering treatment-induced effects.

References

1. Christiane Linster, Silke Sachse, C. Giovanni Galizia: "Computational modeling suggests that response properties rather than spatial position determine connectivity between olfactory glomeruli.", J Neurophysiol, Vol 93, pp 3410-3417, 2005

2. Julia Rein, Martin Strauch, C. Giovanni Galizia: "Novel techniques for the exploration of the honeybee antennal lobe.", poster abstract in Neuroforum Feb 2009(1) Vol.XV, Supplement p. 958, 8th Meeting German Neuroscience Soc., Göttingen, Germany, Mar 25-29, 2009

3. Martin Strauch, C.Giovanni Galizia: "Registration to a neuroanatomical reference atlas - identifying glomeruli in optical recordings of the honeybee brain.", Lecture Notes in Informatics , P-136, pp. 85-95, 2008

Conference: Bernstein Conference on Computational Neuroscience, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 30 Sep - 2 Oct, 2009.

Presentation Type: Poster Presentation

Topic: Sensory processing

Citation: Strauch M, Rein J and Galizia GC (2009). Pattern mining in spontaneous background activity from the honeybee antennal lobe.. Front. Comput. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Bernstein Conference on Computational Neuroscience. doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.10.2009.14.160

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Received: 28 Aug 2009; Published Online: 28 Aug 2009.

* Correspondence: Martin Strauch, University of Konstanz, Department of Neurobiology, Konstanz, Germany, Martin.Strauch@lfb.rwth-aachen.de