June 28, 2019
Why does coffee smell like coffee, whether on a San Diego beach or in the middle of Manhattan? Olfactory systems can distinguish incoming odors from backgrounds, even though different odors activate many of the same olfactory receptors. Nirag’s theoretical and computational study, now accepted in eLife, shows how recently-discovered gain adaptation in Drosophila ORNs, characterized by us and others, can solve this problem of odor coding in different environments.