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Chemical Senses Advance Access published online on September 12, 2008
Chemical Senses, doi:10.1093/chemse/bjn051
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

A Method for Generating Natural and User-Defined Sniffing Patterns in Anesthetized or Reduced Preparations

Man Ching Cheung1, Ryan M. Carey2 and Matt Wachowiak1,2

1 Department of Biology, Boston University, 5 Cummington Street, Boston, MA 02215, USA 2 Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, 5 Cummington Street, Boston, MA 02215, USA

Correspondence should be sent to: Man Ching Cheung, Department of Biology, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA. e-mail: mccheung{at}bu.edu


  Abstract

Sniffing has long been thought to play a critical role in shaping neural responses to odorants at multiple levels of the nervous system. However, it has been difficult to systematically examine how particular parameters of sniffing behavior shape odorant-evoked activity, in large part because of the complexity of sniffing behavior and the difficulty in reproducing this behavior in an anesthetized or reduced preparation. Here we present a method for generating naturalistic sniffing patterns in such preparations. The method involves a nasal ventilator whose movement is controlled by an analog command voltage. The command signal may consist of intranasal pressure transients recorded from awake rats and mice or user-defined waveforms. This "sniff playback" device generates intranasal pressure and airflow transients in anesthetized animals that approximate those recorded from the awake animal and are reproducible across trials and across preparations. The device accurately reproduces command waveforms over an amplitude range of approximately 1 log unit and up to frequencies of approximately 12 Hz. Further, odorant-evoked neural activity imaged during sniff playback appears similar to that seen in awake animals. This method should prove useful in investigating how the parameters of odorant sampling shape neural responses in a variety of experimental settings.

Key words: active sensing, artificial sniffing, behavior, imaging, neural coding, respiration

Accepted 6 August 2008


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