Perception and Encoding of Temporally Patterned Odour Stimuli in Mice

SUMMARY:

During this poster, Dr. Dasgupta explains his lab’s research looking at methodology and applications for analyzing the temporal structure of odour plumes. The main motivation for this research comes from theoretical postulates laid down by J.J. Hopfield (1991) suggesting that temporal structure in odour stimuli contains information about space.
Their work aims to answer the following questions:

• Does naturally occurring odour stimulus contain temporal structure?
• Can olfaction dependent mammals rely on temporal structure to distinguish odour stimuli?
• Does the olfactory bulb encode temporally different odour stimulus.

Dr. Dasgupta goes on to explain how this research will help them to better understand important unsolved questions about scene segmentation and how the brain can can solve problems using olfaction.

Debanjan Dasgupta, PhD

Senior Research Fellow, The Francis Crick Institute

Debanjan Dasgupta is a neuroscientist interested in understanding physiological aspects of neurons and circuits while also dealing with behavioural paradigms. He was trained as a patch clamp electrophysiologist during his PhD at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Later he moved to join Prof. Andreas Schaefer’s lab as a Postdoc scientist where he got exposed to the field of olfaction where his current interests lie. Particularly he is interested in understanding what features in the odour landscape gets encoded and eventually perceived by the mammalian olfactory system.