The Journal of Neurophysiology Vol. 87 No. 6 June 2002, pp. 3160-3164
Copyright ©2002 by the American Physiological Society

RAPID COMMUNICATION

Two Types of Network Oscillations and Their Odor Responses in the Primary Olfactory Center of a Terrestrial Mollusk

Laboratory of Neurobiophysics, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan

Inokuma, Yasuko, Tsuyoshi Inoue, Satoshi Watanabe, and Yutaka Kirino. Two Types of Network Oscillations and Their Odor Responses in the Primary Olfactory Center of a Terrestrial Mollusk. J. Neurophysiol. 87: 3160-3164, 2002. We identified two classes of network oscillations with different frequency ranges in the tentacle ganglion (TG), the primary olfactory center of the terrestrial mollusk Limax marginatus, and investigated the responses of these oscillations to odor inputs. A recent study indicated that there are serotonergic terminals in the TG. We found that when serotonin was applied to the TG, the spontaneous network oscillation of about 1.5 Hz in the TG changed its oscillatory frequency to 0.5 Hz. These two oscillations are distinct, because 1) in most cases, the application of serotonin to the TG initially inhibited the 1.5-Hz oscillation and subsequently generated the slow 0.5-Hz oscillation; and 2) occasionally, the application of serotonin did not inhibit the spontaneous 1.5-Hz oscillation, resulting in the coexistence of two network oscillations. Thus the TG has two different oscillatory dynamics. We named the spontaneous 1.5-Hz oscillation the fast oscillation (FO), and the serotonin-induced 0.5-Hz oscillation the slow oscillation (SO). By calculating the spatial coherence of the TG oscillations, we found that the FO is a noncoherent oscillatory mode and the SO is a coherent oscillatory mode. Finally, odor presentation to the olfactory receptors selectively modulated the SO by decreasing the oscillatory amplitude, but the FO was not modulated by the odor input. These results indicate that 1) the TG has two oscillatory states (FO and SO) and these states are changed by the extracellular level of serotonin, and 2) these two oscillatory states have different responses to odors.