Achievement

Hannah Arnson, with Tim Holy, characterized the burst code of neuronal firing in chemosensory sensation in the mouse. They studied the spontaneous activity of the vomeronasal organ, then compared that activity with firing in response to odors. They observed that these neurons predominantly fired bursts of spikes; while stimulus delivery increased the frequency of bursting, the characteristics of individual bursts were remarkably unchanged by the presence of stimulus. They then blocked or eliminated part of the signal transduction machinery, altering the structure of spontaneous activity, and found that the signal transduction cascade is involved in both spontaneous and stimulus-driven activity. These results provide a first look at how sensory transduction and the firing properties of VSNs impact the encoding scheme of primary sensory neurons in the accessory olfactory system. This work was published in the Journal of Neurophysiology.