We investigate the neurophysiology of olfaction to gain insights into how functions arise from neuronal interactions - both local and long-range.
Olfaction - the sense of smell - is a fascinating modality that is crucial for animals, humans included, to assess the chemical environment.
It is a strong contributor to perception, decision-making, and many other aspects of behaviour in rodents, which has become an important model organism for neuroscience research. This makes the olfactory system an ideal model system to study how sensory systems of the brain work: how functions arise from synaptic interactions between neurons, to ultimately guide animals' decision making.
Two broad directions of our research include:
(1) Local circuit mechanisms in the olfacteory bulb.
Olfactory bulb is the primary area of the olfactory system. It receives direct input from the olfactory nerve. Olfactory signals undergo synaptic processing in this region for the first time, and is transmitted to many downstream areas. Studying the neurophysiology here therefore gives a tractable way of studying circuit functions. Some of the phenomena we study include how olfactory signals are conditioned or filtered; what features of chemical information neurons in the primary olfactory represent, and with what neural codes they do so and what circuit mechanisms underlie generation of such codes?
(2) Interactions of local and long-range circuitry
How is the olfactory processing tuned by behavioural contexts flexibly? We investigate how feedback and neuromodulatory signals alter how the local signal processing works. We define behavioural contexts by designing a variety of custom behavioural paradigms. Such contexts include reward association, whether animals are engaged, and when task difficulty changes by rapid task switching.
We use a variety of methods such as custom-designed complex and quantitative behavioural paradigms, and a range of physiological techniques, including electrophysiology (patch-clamp, juxtacellular, high-density extracellular method like Neuropixels, and LFP recordings), imaging (wide-field and two-photon fluorescence microscopy and photometry), optogenetic perturbations in awake, behaving animals, but also anatomical techniques and in vitro physiology.
We are aslo involved in several collaborations with scientists across disciplines.
