Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Agustin Eleazar Lara | email: agustin.e.lara@hotmail.com
Agustin Eleazar Lara 1°, Emiliano Marachlian 2°, Martin Klappenbach 1°, Fernando Locatelli 1°
1° Instituto de fisiología, biología molecular y neurociencias IFIByNE-CONICET
2° Institut de Biologie de lEcole Normale Supérieure IBENS
A salient feature of insect´s and vertebrate´s olfactory circuits is the existence of multiple neural tracts that form parallel pathways between periphery and higher brain centers. This aspect has sparked the interest of functional and computational approaches that ask whether and how the parallel tracts convey differential information. We investigate the role of two parallel olfactory tracts described in the honey bee brain. In previous studies we measured odor representation in one of these tracts and found that appetitive but not aversive learning increases the representation of the learned odor. In a recent study we found that bees can recognize appetitive and aversive learned odors when both are presented as a mixture, which suggests that appetitive and aversive odors are processed without getting mixed. These results lead as to postulate that information about aversive and appetitive odors might be split in the antennal lobe and segregated through the parallel olfactory tracts. To address this hypothesis we are performing experiments based on appetitive and aversive learning and evaluating the effect of lesioning one of both tracts. The tracts are stained after behavioural experiments to validate the specificity of the lesion. Preliminary results obtained until now show that lesion of the medial tract does not impair behaviour elicited by appetitive learned odors while lesion of the lateral tract does. Next experiments are focused on aversive olfactory learning.