Odorant Mixture Separation in Drosophila Early Olfactory System

Natural odorant scenes are complex landscapes comprising mixtures of volatile compounds. It was previously proposed that the Antennal Lobe circuit recovers the odorant identity in a concentration-invariant manner via divisive normalization of Local Neurons. It remains unclear, however, how identities of odorant components in a mixture is represented or recovered in the fruit fly early olfactory pathway. In the current work, we take a different approach from the traditional steady-state analyses that classify odorant mixture encoding into configural vs. elemental schemes. Instead, we focus on the spatio-temporal responses of the early olfactory pathway at the levels of the Antennal Lobe and the Mushroom Body, and formulate the odorant demixing problem as a blind source separation problem - where the identities of each individual odorant component and their corresponding concentration waveforms are recovered from the spatio-temporal PSTH of Olfactory Sensory Neurons (OSNs), Projection Neurons (PNs), and Kenyon Cells (KCs) respectively. Building upon previous models of the Antenna and the Antennal Lobe, we advanced a feedback divisive normalization architecture of the Mushroom Body Calyx circuit comprised of PN, KC and the giant Anterior Paired Lateral (APL) neuron. We demonstrate that the PN-KC-APL circuit produces a high dimensional representation of odorant mixture with robust sparsity, and results in greater odorant demixing performance than the PN responses.