Matching Items (4)
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- All Subjects: Olfaction
- Creators: Smith, Brian
- Creators: Ghaninia, Majid
Description
ABSTRACT Communication is vital in the context of everyday life for all organisms, but particularly so in social insects, such as Z. nevadensis. The overall lifestyle and need for altruistic acts of individuals within a colony depends primarily on intracolony chemical communication, with a focus on odorants. The perception of these odorants is made possible by the chemoreceptive functions of sensilla basiconica and sensilla trichoid which exist on the antennal structure. The present study consists of both a morphological analysis and electrophysiological experiment concerning sensilla basiconica. It attempts to characterize the function of neurons present in sensilla basiconica through single sensillum recordings and contributes to existing literature by determining if a social insect, such as the dampwood termite, is able to perceive a wide spectrum of odorants despite having significantly fewer olfactory receptors than most other social insect species. Results indicated that sensilla basiconica presence significantly out-paced that of sensilla trichoid and sensilla chaetica combined, on all flagellomeres. Analysis demonstrated significant responses to all general odorants and several cuticular hydrocarbons. Combined with the knowledge of fewer olfactory receptors present in this species and their lifestyle, results may indicate a positive association between the the social complexity of an insect's lifestyle and the number of ORs the individuals within that colony possess.
ContributorsMcGlone, Taylor (Author) / Liebig, Juergen (Thesis director) / Ghaninia, Majid (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Fruit flies show a strong attraction to fruit odors. Most fruit odors, including strawberry scent, are complex multimolecular mixtures comprised of many chemically distinct constituents. How animals are able to process these mixtures and derive behaviorally relevant information is largely unknown. A new procedure was created to test odor preference for Heisenberg canton-s strain of Drosophila melanogaster. 30 flies were cold anesthetized at 4.2°C for 30 minutes and then placed in a testing arena. After acclimating for 45 minutes, the flies were exposed to two sources of air, one with ripe strawberry odor and one with only humidified air. Images were captured every minute for an hour and a preference index was calculated for every 10th image. The Drosophila had a positive average preference for the strawberry odor. Five out of six trials showed a general increase in odor preference over the course of the trial. While there was a generally positive trend for average preference over time, there was not a significant increase in average odor preference from time 1 to time 60. The data indicates that Drosophila show a preference for strawberry odor over humidified air, and we propose to extend this test to investigate how Drosophila process and react to complex odors and their chemical constituents.
ContributorsSteinmetz, Kyle J (Author) / Smith, Brian (Thesis director) / Jernigan, Chris (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
The mammalian olfactory system is commonly studied by using the mouse as a model system. Odor habituation is used to investigate odor perception and learning processes. Most previous experimental preparations have been tedious, requiring a researcher to manually change odorants, record investigation time and duration at each odorant, or physical alteration on the mice to enable video tracking. These limitations were overcame by creating an odorized hole-board to allow for systematic and automatic recording of olfactory behavior in mice. A cohort of five male mice were utilized in these experiments and the responses to the odor of strawberries, a diet staple of wile mice, were examined. Experiment 1 showed that free-feeding mice exhibit a preference to locations with strawberry (over control locations), even when these locations can only be identified using olfaction. This preference habituates within a trial but not across days. Experiment 2 showed that strawberry odor without reward causes habituation or extinction to the odor both within trials and across days. From these experiments, it can be concluded that mice innately explore strawberry odor and this can be exploited to the study odor habituation using an odorized hole-board.
ContributorsMa, Jason (Author) / Smith, Brian (Thesis director) / Gerkin, Richard (Committee member) / Oddo, Salvatore (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Honeybees require the use of their antennae to perceive different scents and pheromones, communicate with other members of the colony, and even detect wind vibrations, sound waves, and carbon dioxide levels. Limiting and/or removing this sense makes bees much less effective at acquiring information. However, how antennal movements might be important for olfaction has not been studied in detail. The focus of this work was to evaluate how restriction of antennae movements might affect a bee’s ability to detect and perceive odors. Bees were made to learn a certain odor and were then split up into a control group, a treatment group that had their antennae fixed with eicosane, and a sham treatment group that had a dot of eicosane on their heads in such a way that it would not affect antennae movements but still add the same amount of weight. Following a period of acclimation, the bees were tested with the conditioned odor, one that was perceptually similar to it, and to a dissimilar odor. Using proboscis-extension duration and latency as response measures, it became clear that both antenna fixation and sham treatments affected the conditioned behavior. However, these treatment effects did not reach statistical significance. Briefly, both fixation of antennae as well as the sham treatment reduced the discriminability of the conditioned and similar odors. Although more data can be collected to more fully evaluate the significance of the treatments, the behavior of the sham group could indicate that mechanoreceptive hairs on the head play an important role in olfaction. It is also possible that there are other factors at play, possibly induced by the fixed bees’ increased stress levels.
ContributorsHozan, Alvin Robert (Author) / Smith, Brian H (Thesis advisor) / Lei, Hong (Committee member) / Cook, Chelsea (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021