Other sensory systems

Rat olfactory bulb: Receptive field of a mitral cell among the glomeruli on the dorsal surface. Only 4 glomeruli contribute to this neuron's response. Contrast that with the smooth and dense receptive fields of retinal neurons (Fantana 2008).

Everybody wants to discover general principles of brain function. To qualify as a general principle, a phenomenon has to occur in at least two places. That's why we undertake forays into other sensory systems, such as olfaction [1-4]. At times the comparisons to visual processing are useful, on other occasions these studies have shown the limits of analogy between sensory systems. We would also love to understand how magnetoreception works – one of the last true mysteries in sensory biology. So far we have at least figured out how it doesn't work [5].

[1] Fantana, AL, Soucy, ER, Meister, M (2008) Rat olfactory bulb mitral cells receive sparse glomerular inputs. Neuron 59:802–814. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2008.07.039.

[2] Soucy, ER, Albeanu, DF, Fantana, AL, Murthy, VN, Meister, M (2009) Precision and diversity in an odor map on the olfactory bulb. Nat Neurosci 12:210–220. doi: 10.1038/nn.2262

[3] Geffen, MN, Broome, BM, Laurent, G, Meister, M (2009) Neural encoding of rapidly fluctuating odors. Neuron 61:570–586. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2009.01.021.

[4] Meister, M (2015) On the dimensionality of odor space. eLife 4:e07865. doi: 10.7554/eLife.07865.

[5] Meister, M (2016) Physical limits to magnetogenetics. Elife 5. doi: 10.7554/eLife.17210.001.