CU Professor John Crimaldi is the lead PI on a $7 million collaboration funded by the NSF since 2015 to understand how animals navigate through odor plumes, and how the brain functions during this process.听The involves seven investigators at six institutions (University of baby直播app Boulder,听University of California Berkeley, NYU Langone School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Yale School of Medicine, and the Weill Cornell Medical College). Through this effort, the team is investigating the spatiotemporal structure听of chemical plumes in air and water, developing odor-based search algorithms that could be implemented in autonomous vehicles, and creating mechanistic models of animal brain function during odor navigation.
This summer the Odor Navigation team published three papers on their findings:
, led by investigators at CU and published in Experiments in Fluids, describes experimental techniques developed in Crimaldi鈥檚 lab for creating and quantifying the spatiotemporal structure of听airborne odor plumes in the laboratory using ultraviolet听laser-induced fluorescence.听听The data from this study were then used in the studies described in the second two papers.
, led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medical College and published in PLoS Computational Biology, uses an information-theoretic analysis to investigate which odor-sampling strategies are most听informative about determining the location of an odor source.
, let by investigators at NYU Langone School of Medicine and published in eLife, uses experimental studies of fruit flies to relate odor navigation behavior to neural activity in the fly鈥檚 brain, forming the basis for a mechanistic model of brain function.
The third听paper was the subject of听a separate also published this summer in eLife.听听Insight articles explain why a particular paper is significant in a given field of research, thus giving听the paper broader exposure and impact.
Together, these three papers advance current knowledge of the structure of odor plumes, the relevant information embedded within the plumes about source location, and the neural听algorithms used by animals听for effective source localization.
The team鈥檚 research was previously featured on the PBS NewsHour program: