THE PROBLEM

Animals use odor cues to navigate through their environments, helping them locate targets and assess danger. Much of how animal brains organize, read out, and respond to odor stimuli across spatial and temporal scales is not well understood. Odor2Action aims to transform current knowledge of how different animal brains create neural representations of odors, translate odor signals across neural circuits, and produce adaptive natural behaviors. This knowledge can lead to broad impacts across science, technology, health, and policy. Ultimately, our work will inform the development of algorithms, robots, and other engineered devices to detect, identify, and locate chemical sources, which can be applied to fields ranging from homeland security to food safety. 

THE APPROACH

Odor2Action uses a team science approach to leverage the unique talents from leading neuroscientists, theorists, engineers, biologists, computer scientists, and physicists. 

The network is organized into three synergistic interdisciplinary research groups (IRGs). Each IRG integrates theory and experimental approaches in ways that produce complementary interactions across levels of biological analysis. Our work uses fruit fly, honeybee, and mouse models to determine how neural representations of odor are generated, reformatted, and translated to generate useful behaviors that guide how animals interact with their environment.

INNOVATIONS

We will apply our findings to develop new technologies in measurement and control of stimuli, quantification of behavior, and recording of neural activity and circuit tracing. We envision the network as a mechanism for creating and disseminating expertise in these areas both within and outside of the network.