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- Title
Spatiotemporal Coding of Individual Chemicals by the Gustatory System.
- Authors
Reiter, Sam; Rodriguez, Chelsey Campillo; Kui Sun; Stopfer, Mark
- Abstract
Four of the five major sensory systems (vision, olfaction, somatosensation, and audition) are thought to use different but partially overlapping sets of neurons to form unique representations of vast numbers of stimuli. The only exception is gustation, which is thought to represent only small numbers of basic taste categories. However, using new methods for delivering tastant chemicals and making electrophysiological recordings from the tractable gustatory system of the moth Manduca sexta,we found chemical-specific information is as follows: (1) initially encoded in the population of gustatory receptor neurons as broadly distributed spatiotemporal patterns of activity; (2) dramatically integrated and temporally transformed as it propagates to monosynaptically connected second-order neurons; and (3) observed in tastant-specific behavior. Our results are consistent with an emerging view of the gustatory system: rather than constructing basic taste categories, it uses a spatiotemporal population code to generate unique neural representations of individual tastant chemicals.
- Subjects
SENSE organs; SENSES; NEURONS; ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY; TASTE perception
- Publication
Journal of Neuroscience, 2015, Vol 35, Issue 35, p12309
- ISSN
0270-6474
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3802-14.2015