Dinu Florin Albeanu

How does the brain encode stimuli from the outside world, within and across sensory modalities, to generate specific perceptions that trigger complex behaviors? How is the brain shaped by sensory experience, and what modifications occur in neuronal circuits that allow us to learn and remember? These are the questions guiding the work of Florin Albeanu, who is using the olfactory bulb and olfactory cortex of mice as the subject of his current studies. Airborne chemicals, translated into neuronal signals by specific receptors in the nose, are sent directly to the olfactory bulb. Advances in optical imaging and optogenetics combined with electrophysiological recordings enable Albeanu and colleagues to monitor and/or alter patterns of activity at unprecedented synaptic and millisecond resolution, in real time, as animals are engaged in various behaviors. For survival, rodents need to identify the smells of objects of interest such as food, mates, and predators, across their recurring appearances in the surroundings, despite apparent variations in their features. Furthermore, animals aptly extract relevant information about environment across different sensory modalities, combining olfactory, visual, or auditory cues. By recording neuronal activity in the input and output layers of the olfactory bulb, as well as feedback from olfactory cortical areas and neuromodulatory signals, Albeanu and his team aim to understand computations the bulb performs and how this information is decoded deeper in the brain. They have recently published evidence suggesting that the mouse olfactory bulb is not merely a relay station between the nose and cortex, as many have supposed. Using optogenetic tools and a novel patterned illumination technique, they discovered that there are many more information output channels leaving the olfactory bulb for the cortex than there are inputs received from the nose. They are currently investigating how this diversity of bulb outputs is generated, as well as how downstream areas, such as the piriform and parietal cortex, make use of such information during behaviors.