Submitted on January 26, 2009
Revised on February 24, 2009
Accepted on February 25, 2009
Odor perception and olfactory bulb plasticity in adult mammals
Nathalie Mandairon1 and Christiane Linster2*
1 CNRS
2 Cornell University
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: cl243{at}cirnell.edu.
The adult mammalian olfactory bulb is unique in that olfactory sensory neurons project directly, without prior thalamic relay, to the olfactory bulb. This review discusses evidence for the direct involvement of the olfactory bulb in odor perception and its modulation by olfactory experience. We first discuss recent data showing that the olfactory bulb exhibits a high level of plasticity in response to olfactory experience including exposure, enrichment and learning. We next review evidence showing that in return, experimental manipulation of the olfactory bulb neural network changes how odorants are processed and perceived. We finally review in more detail a few experiments showing a tight correlation between the modulation of olfactory bulb neural processing and odor perception. We argue that the olfactory bulb has evolved to be an adapting network, allowing animals to adjust olfactory computations to changing environments.
