Evolution seems to have repeatedly converged on a similar architecture in the early olfactory system of many animals. We offer an efficient-coding framework to understand this. Out in @pnas.org now! Led by @jzv.bsky.social, driven by Juan Carlos, + help from Farhad. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New preprint from our group (collaboration with @sueyeonchung.bsky.social) showing that discriminating odor components within a complex mixture is constrained by neural sensitivity rather than background interference - likely due to sparse representations at the front end.

Happy to see this collaboration with @neurovenki.bsky.social out - featuring great work by Juan Carlos!

Excited to share new computational work, led by @jzv.bsky.social, driven by Juan Carlos Fernandez del Castillo + contribution from Farhad Pashakanloo. We recover 3 core motifs in the olfactory system of evolutionarily distant animals using a biophysically-grounded model + efficient coding ideas!

Excited to share our latest!! Thanks to everyone involved especially @neurovenki.bsky.social!

Happy to share our latest preprint! Very thankful of this project that have allowed me to (1) learn a lot, (2) work with very talented and rigorous people, and (3) capitalize 1 and 2 for delving into how mice olfactory system deals with very brief, intermittent odor stimuli.

Yes, many worrying things happening in science that should take priority in grabbing our attention - but we are worried precisely because scientific knowledge is worth creating. In that spirit, I am proud to highlight our latest @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint! #neuroscience 🧪

For folks attending #Cosyne24, do check out the workshop Anqi Zhang and I are organizing:"Comparative approaches to advance neural circuits and computation". It's on March 4th!

Engineered odorant receptors illuminate structural principles of odor discrimination https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.16.567230v1