PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Tiberiu Tesileanu
AU  - Simona Cocco
AU  - Remi Monasson
AU  - Vijay Balasubramanian
TI  - Adaptation of olfactory receptor abundances for efficient coding
AID  - 10.1101/255547
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 255547
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/22/255547.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/22/255547.full
AB  - Olfactory receptor usage is highly heterogeneous, with some receptor types being orders of magnitude more abundant than others. We propose an explanation for this striking fact: the receptor distribution is tuned to maximally represent information about the olfactory environment in a regime of efficient coding that is sensitive to the global context of correlated sensor responses. This model predicts that in mammals, where olfactory sensory neurons are replaced regularly, receptor abundances should continuously adapt to odor statistics. Experimentally, increased exposure to odorants leads variously, but reproducibly, to increased, decreased, or unchanged abundances of different activated receptors. We demonstrate that this diversity of effects is required for efficient coding when sensors are broadly correlated, and provide an algorithm for predicting which olfactory receptors should increase or decrease in abundance following specific environmental changes. Finally, we give simple dynamical rules for neural birth and death processes that might underlie this adaptation.