We use a data set on odor responses of Drosophila larval odor receptors coupled with chemotaxis behavioral assays to examine rules of odor coding.
(A ) Hierarchical clusters created from Euclidean distance values between Drosophila Ors calculated using: (left to right) shared optimized descriptors; known activity to training set odors (Hallem and Carlson, 2006 ); overlap across top 500 predicted ligands; and Phylogenic tree of receptors (Hallem and Carlson, 2006 ).
Third, this functional data set maps odors to single values, disregarding the fact that odor responses are temporally structured at the level of olfactory receptors already.
Dry clean anything that can't be washed but ask first, as dry cleaning can set some odors for good (such as moth ball scent).
The third question examined was how odor receptors set peak responses to odors in the behavioral assay.
To investigate this idea with a larger set of odor stimuli, we designed a set of triangle-shaped odor waveforms with peak times varying uniformly between 0.6 s and 1.7 s after the stimulus onset.
Unfortunately, a comprehensive comparison of our behavioral data to the physiology of Or-expressing neurons is not possible because the odor set used by Kreher et al. (2008) does not include data for all odor pairs employed here.
False alarm rates did not differ between the odor sets at the 4 and 16 days testing.
Hence, the odor set included acids, lactones, terpenes, aromatics, alcohols, esters, ketones and the natural blend, balsamic vinegar.
Moreover, a follow-up analysis where consistently identified items were removed from the low familiar odor set, revealed an even lower memory performance across all retention intervals.
