What is it about?
Why have animals as different as insects and mammals independently evolved remarkably similar ways to process smell in their brains? We show that the signature features of early olfactory circuits can emerge from a simple model that tries to preserve as much information about odors as possible.
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Why is it important?
Many animals rely on smell to find food, mates, and danger, yet it has remained unclear why evolution repeatedly arrived at the same basic circuit design. Our results suggest that this architecture is not arbitrary: it is a good way to preserve odor information under realistic biological constraints. That gives a unifying explanation for a classic sensory circuit, suggests when and why deviations from the standard architecture might arise, and makes predictions that future experiments can test.
Perspectives
This work was very satisfying for my co-authors and me, because it highlights how formalizing an idea in concrete mathematical terms allows us to test different variations in a rigorous way, and be more precise about what outcomes one can expect given the assumptions we make. That is a common thread in theoretical research.
Venkatesh Murthy
Harvard University
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This page is a summary of: Convergent motifs of early olfactory processing are recapitulated by layer-wise efficient coding, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2524661123.
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