How the olfactory bulb maintains stable odor manifolds amid adaptation and representational drift

Zheng, CiCi Xingyu, Yu, Bin, Navlakha, Saket, Koulakov, Alexei (January 2026) How the olfactory bulb maintains stable odor manifolds amid adaptation and representational drift. bioRxiv. ISSN 2692-8205 (Submitted)

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Abstract

Adaptive coding in sensory circuits enables stable perception while accommodating experience-dependent changes. In the olfactory bulb (OB), repeated odor exposure reshapes population activity even without explicit behavioral feedback, but the underlying circuit mechanisms remain unclear. By analyzing longitudinal two-photon calcium imaging datasets from the mouse OB, we identified three concurrent forms of representational change: gain adaptation, similarity-dependent pattern separation or convergence, and a rotation of encoding subspace resulting in the representational drift. Using a computational model of the mitral cell-granule cell circuit, we showed that Hebbian plasticity and structural connectivity constraints are sufficient to reproduce these transformations. Despite global representational drift, the relative geometry of odor response vectors remained stable, preserving a low-dimensional odor manifold. Together, our results reveal how local plasticity and network structure jointly enable both stability and flexibility in early sensory coding.

Item Type: Paper
Subjects: organism description > animal behavior
organism description > animal behavior > olfactory
organs, tissues, organelles, cell types and functions > tissues types and functions > olfactory bulb
organs, tissues, organelles, cell types and functions
organs, tissues, organelles, cell types and functions > tissues types and functions
CSHL Authors:
Communities: CSHL labs > Koulakov lab
CSHL labs > Navlakha lab
School of Biological Sciences > Publications
SWORD Depositor: CSHL Elements
Depositing User: CSHL Elements
Date: 25 January 2026
Date Deposited: 25 Feb 2026 14:23
Last Modified: 25 Feb 2026 14:23
PMCID: PMC12871626
Related URLs:
URI: https://repository.cshl.edu/id/eprint/42094

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