Antennal Lobe is the deutocerebral neuropil of the insect which receive the input from the sensory neurons on the antenna. In insects the olfactory pathway starts at the antennae (Though in some insects like drosophila there are olfactory sensory neurons in other parts of the body) from where the sensory neurons carry the information about the odorant molecules impinging on the antenna to the antennal lobe. The antennal lobe is made of tens (this number is species specific) of neuropils where the sensory neurons synapse with the two other kinds of neurons, the projection neurons and the local neurons. The projection neurons are called so because they receive inputs from the olfactory receptro neurons and project to the higher brain centers like mushroom body and lateral horn. The local neurons are have their neurites restricted in the antennal lobe. The interraction between the olfactory receptor neurons, local neurons and projection neurons reformats the information input from the sensory neurons in to a spatio temporal code before being send to the higher brain centers. There are plasticities at different time scales within the antennal lobe. Neuropil is the feltwork of unmyelinated neuronal processes (axonal and dendritic) within the gray matter of the central nervous system Traditionally, when pathologists looked at brain tissue they concentrated on neurons (the active functioning cells of the brain), glial cells and axons (especially in white matter, which is mostly composed... Neurons (also called nerve cells) are the primary cells of the nervous system. ... In biology, antenna (plural: antennae) refers to the sensing organs of several arthropods. ... Olfaction, the sense of smell, is the detection of chemicals dissolved in air (or, by animals that breathe water, in water). ... Species Many; see text. ... Illustration of the major elements in a prototypical synapse. ... The mushroom bodies or corpora pedunculata are a pair of structures in the brain of insects and other arthropods. ... This page is a candidate to be moved to Wiktionary. ...

References

• Buck, Linda and Richard Axel. (1991). A Novel Multigene Family May Encode Odorant Receptors: A Molecular Basis for Odor Recognition. Cell 65:175-183.
• Keller, A and Vosshall, LB. (2004). A psychophysical test of the vibration theory of olfaction. Nature Neuroscience 7:337-338. See also the editorial on p. 315.
• Turin, Luca. (1996). A spectroscopic mechanism for primary olfactory reception. Chemical Senses, 21, 773-791.
• Turin, Luca. (2002). A method for the calculation of odor character from molecular structure. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 216, 367-385.
• Stopfer, Mark.; Jayaraman, Vivek.; Laurent, Gilles. (2003) Intensity versus Identity Coding in an Olfactory System, Neuron 39, 991-1004.
• Stopfer, Mark. and Laurent, Gilles. (1999). Short-term memory in olfactory network dynamics, Nature 402, 664-668.
• Chandler Burr. (2003). The Emperor of Scent : A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses. ISBN 0375507973
• Laurent, Gilles. Olfactory network dynamics and the coding of multidimensional signals Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3:884-895 (2002)

External links

• Olfactory network dynamics and the coding of multidimensional signals (PDF)