The Shepherd-Willhite Laboratory

Yale School of Medicine

Department of Neurobiology

Publications

Dendritic action potentials connect distributed dendrodendritic microcircuits

Using a realistic modeling approach we show how backpropagating action potentials in the long lateral dendrites of mitral cells, together with granule cell actions on mitral cells within narrow columns forming glomerular units, can provide a mechanism to activate strong local inhibition between arbitrarily distant mitral cells, giving insight into the functional significance of viral tracing studies.

An Energy Budget for the Olfactory Glomerulus

We performed a quantitative analysis of the energy demands of each type of neuronal element within the glomerulus.  The results provide a new quantitative basis for interpreting olfactory bulb activation patterns elicited by odor stimulation.

Viral tracing identifies distributed columnar organization in the olfactory bulb                                                                    

The Pseudorabies virus was used as a marker of neural connectivity.  Well defined columns extending through the depth of the granule cell layer were labeled in a distributed pattern.

For a more complete list of publications, click here.  Below are selected recent articles.

Click on the image at left for a PDF version of the manuscript.

Olfactory discrimination ability of CD-1 mice for aliphatic aldehydes as a function of stimulus concentration                        Using an operant conditioning paradigm, we tested the ability of CD-1 mice to discriminate between members of a homologous series of aliphatic aldehydes.  At lower concentrations, discrimination performance diminishes.