Sehdev A*, Mohammed YG*, Triphan T, Szyszka P. 

Olfactory object recognition based on fine-scale stimulus timing in Drosophila.

bioRxiv, 2018

• Flies can use temporal differences in odorant arrival down to 5 milliseconds to segregate mixtures of attractive and aversive odorants.
• Odor source segregation works for odorants with innate, as well as learned valences.
• Thus, the insect olfactory system can use stimulus timing for olfactory object segregation, similar as mammalian auditory or visual systems use stimulus timing for concurrent sound segregation and figure-ground segregation.

Egea-Weiss A*, Renner A*, Kleineidam CJ, Szyszka P. 

High precision of spike timing across olfactory receptor neurons allows rapid odor coding in Drosophila. 

iScience, 2018

• Olfactory receptor neuron responses are fast and temporally precise
• Odor-evoked spikes can occur 3 ms after odorant arrival and jitter less than 1 ms
• First-spike timing varies over a wider concentration range than spike rate
• Neural network model demonstrates the plausibility of a spike-timing code for odors