Being able to perceive an individual odor in a continually changing and rich olfactory environment is a challenging task. Here, Rokni and colleagues find that this olfactory cocktail party problem can be studied in mice and reveal that the ability to identify a specific odor in a complex odorous scene is constrained by the amount of overlap in the representations of target and background odors at the level of olfactory receptors.
- Dan Rokni
- Vivian Hemmelder
- Venkatesh N Murthy