A self-organizing model of chemotopic convergence for olfactory coding

This article presents a self-organizing model of convergence for the early stages of the olfactory pathway. The model generates a chemotopic projection from olfactory receptor neurons onto glomeruli based on receptor affinity distributions. The resulting glomerular images reveal an olfactory code consistent with neurobiology, whereby odor quality is encoded by a unique spatial pattern across glomeruli, and odor concentration is related to the intensity and spread of this pattern. The model is also able to predict a broadening of the intensity tuning range of glomeruli.