Evolution seems to have repeatedly converged on a similar architecture in the early olfactory system of many animals. We offer an efficient-coding framework to understand this. Out in @pnas.org now! Led by @jzv.bsky.social, driven by Juan Carlos, + help from Farhad. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New preprint from our group (collaboration with @sueyeonchung.bsky.social) showing that discriminating odor components within a complex mixture is constrained by neural sensitivity rather than background interference - likely due to sparse representations at the front end.

Happy to see this collaboration with @neurovenki.bsky.social out - featuring great work by Juan Carlos!

Convergent motifs of early olfactory processing are recapitulated by layer-wise efficient coding The architecture of early olfactory processing is a striking example of convergent evolution. Typically, a panel of broadly tuned receptors is selectively expressed in sensory neurons (each neuron exp...

Excited to share new computational work, led by @jzv.bsky.social, driven by Juan Carlos Fernandez del Castillo + contribution from Farhad Pashakanloo. We recover 3 core motifs in the olfactory system of evolutionarily distant animals using a biophysically-grounded model + efficient coding ideas!

Excited to share our latest!! Thanks to everyone involved especially @neurovenki.bsky.social!

Happy to share our latest preprint! Very thankful of this project that have allowed me to (1) learn a lot, (2) work with very talented and rigorous people, and (3) capitalize 1 and 2 for delving into how mice olfactory system deals with very brief, intermittent odor stimuli.

Perception and neural representation of intermittent odor stimuli in mice Odor cues in nature are sparse and highly fluctuating due to turbulent transport. To investigate how animals perceive these intermittent cues, we developed a behavioral task in which head-restrained m...

Yes, many worrying things happening in science that should take priority in grabbing our attention - but we are worried precisely because scientific knowledge is worth creating. In that spirit, I am proud to highlight our latest @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint! #neuroscience 🧪

For folks attending #Cosyne24, do check out the workshop Anqi Zhang and I are organizing:"Comparative approaches to advance neural circuits and computation". It's on March 4th!

Engineered odorant receptors illuminate structural principles of odor discrimination https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.16.567230v1 A central challenge in olfaction is understanding how the olfactory system detects and distinguishes

Engineered odorant receptors illuminate structural principles of odor discrimination www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11....