How the olfactory bulb maintains stable odor manifolds amid adaptation and representational drift.

ABSTRACT: Adaptive coding in sensory circuits enables stable perception while accommodating experience-dependent changes. In the olfactory bulb (OB), repeated odor exposure reshapes population activity even without explicit behavioral feedback, but the underlying circuit mechanisms remain unclear. By analyzing longitudinal two-photon calcium imaging datasets from the mouse OB, we identified three concurrent forms of representational change: gain adaptation, similarity-dependent pattern separation or convergence, and a rotation of encoding subspace resulting in the representational drift. Using a computational model of the mitral cell-granule cell circuit, we showed that Hebbian plasticity and structural connectivity constraints are sufficient to reproduce these transformations. Despite global repres

SUBMITTER: Zheng CX 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12871626 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature