Mixture suppression in olfaction: electrophysiological evaluation of the contribution of peripheral and central neural components

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Abstract
Interactions among the components of stimulus mixtures are common in both olfaction and taste, and therefore must be considered in studies of chemical coding. These interactions usually take the form of mixture suppression, where the response to a mixture is less than expected from simple additivity of responses to the components of the mixture. We have evaluated the importance of peripheral and central neural events in the generation of mixture suppression, using the olfactory system of the spiny lobster and a set of previously identified stimulatory and suppressive components of a natural food of lobsters. Both peripheral and central events appear to contribute to the observed mixture suppression. The finding that the average response of 19 receptor cells to the stimulatory components was significantly reduced by the suppressive components indicates that mixture suppression is at least partially generated in the peripheral olfactoty system. But central mechanisms of mixture suppression also exist, since some interneurons in the brain were shown to be suppressed even when the stimulants and suppressants were presented to separate receptor cells. Thus, in the lobster, neural events responsible for the generation of mixture suppression exist at more than one level of the olfactory pathway.

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