Boston University Department of Biology

Faculty Profiles

Current Research

We study how the nervous system encodes odor information, and how the brain processes this information. In other words, how does the brain identify smells? This is a tough problem because most smells are complex mixtures of different odor molecules, because the number of different smells that an animal must detect and identify is huge, and because the olfactory environment is highly variable over time and space. Our focus is on understanding how patterns of neural activity encode odor information and how this code changes as a result of neural processing. A major interest of the lab is in understanding olfaction as an active sense in which the detection, encoding and processing of odor information is shaped by the animal’s behavior at all levels of the nervous system. Another major interest is in understanding the plasticity of odor codes at multiple time-scales, due to factors such as attention, experience, and injury to the nervous system. We use optical imaging as a primary tool to directly visualize neural activity as an animal smells an odor, and also to investigate how neurons process olfactory information using reduced preparations. We image activity in the earliest stages of the olfactory pathway – among olfactory receptor neurons, which detect odorants, and neurons in the olfactory bulb, the first stage of olfactory processing in the brain. We also integrate these data with behavioral assays in order to understand how neural activity relates to sensory perception.

Courses Taught

• BI 575, Techniques in Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

Selected Publications

• Carey RC, Wesson DW, Verhagen JV, Pirez N, Wachowiak M (2009). Temporal structure of receptor neuron input to the olfactory bulb imaged in behaving rats. J Neurophysiol 101:1073-1088.
• Pírez N, Wachowiak M (2008). In vivo modulation of sensory input to the olfactory bulb by tonic and activity-dependent presynaptic inhibition of receptor neurons. J Neurosci 28:6360-6371.
• Wesson DW, Carey RC, Verhagen JV, Wachowiak M.  (2008). Rapid encoding and perception of novel odors in the rat. PLoS Biology. vol. 6:e82.
• Verhagen JV, Wesson DW, Netoff T, White JA, Wachowiak M (2007). Sniffing controls an adaptive filter of sensory input to the olfactory bulb. Nature Neurosci 10, 631-639.
• Spors H, Wachowiak M, Cohen LB, Friedrich RW (2006). Temporal dynamics and latency patterns of receptor neuron input to the olfactory bulb. J Neurosci 26, 1247-1259.
• McGann JP, Pirez N, Gainey MA, Muratore C, Elias AS, Wachowiak M (2005). Odorant representations are modulated by intra- but not interglomerular inhibition of olfactory sensory neurons. Neuron 48, 1039-1053.
• Bozza T, McGann, JP, Mombaerts P, Wachowiak M (2004). In vivo imaging of neuronal activity by targeted expression of a genetically encoded probe in the mouse. Neuron 42, 9-21.