What does the sense of smell look like?

What does the sense of smell look like? My videos with Labocine relate to this question in different ways.

The video clips in the "Odor response in the brain of an ant" series depict neural activity in a region of the ant's brain, analogous to the mammalian olfactory bulb, as the ant smells odorous substances. The short film "THEY LIVE LIKE ANTS" (co-created with director Laura Moss) explores the idea of revealing biological processes through science.

Among ant species, the clonal raider ant (Ooceraea biroi) is unusually suitable for genetics and neuroscience experiments because it is relatively simple to generate and maintain mutant lineages in the lab.

Ants are tiny, but their olfactory senses are sophisticated, perhaps due to their use of a large repertoire of pheromones to communicate within the colony. For example, ants emit various pheromone substances to alert their nestmates to potential danger, to mark the path toward food, or to recruit foraging help. They also secrete waxy substances that help mark their membership in a particular colony through a unique odor blend.

As a grad student, I wanted to study what happens in the ant's brain when the ant encounters these various pheromones. Since even tiny ants possess tens of thousands of neurons, this was no simple endeavor.

To make it possible to efficiently record brain activity, I generated ants with a gene insertion that caused their olfactory neurons to express a fluorescent protein. In these ants, the first of their kind, excitation of the olfactory neurons causes the protein to shift into a highly fluorescent state, which can be recorded by microscope to track neuronal activity over time. Different odorant molecules activate distinct sub-regions of the olfactory system in the brain, which is divided into 500+ functional units called glomeruli. The different video clips vary in which odor substance was used as stimulus, as well as the part of the olfactory system on view.

Clonal raider ant pupae are transparent, making it easy to see fluorescent proteins present in the nervous system. This image is a composite of white-light and fluorescence microscopy photos.

At the time that I worked on "THEY LIVE LIKE ANTS." I had succeeded at creating the transgenic ants for my experiments, but had yet to develop the methods necessary to actually capture neural activity happening inside the ant's brain. The "Odor response in the brain of an ant" videos were taken at the culmination of that project, three years later.

Each day, we spend substantial cognitive effort to interpret the words, expressions, and actions of those around us. But as a scientist, I possessed the rare privilege of watching neural activity unfold inside an organism - in a species that had never been viewed this way before. Even still, my years of studies only scratched the surface of the ant brain's secrets, because of the complexity of its neural circuitry and the many different contexts in which it can operate. I believe that science/art should both depict the conventionally unobservable that science reveals to us, while at the same time emphasizing the ways that nature eludes understanding by our methodologies. I hope that the videos on my Labocine profile convey these messages.

The transgenic clonal raider ants also express a red fluorescent protein throughout much of their body. Filters are used to separately view red and green light emission. This image is a composite of white-light and fluorescence microscopy photos.

These days, I work as a staff editor in scientific publishing, where my job is to identify research with wide potential interest among biologists and corroborate its validity through peer review. The emotional or phenomenological side of research level often does not fit into this framework either because of limited space or scope. Because of this, I'm thankful that venues like Labocine provide a venue for a more expansive view of science, which science/art collaborations can provide the best of.

About the author

I am an invertebrate neuroscientist by training, as well as lover of art, nature, science, and the intersections between these topics and society. I work as an editor at the scientific journal PLOS Biology, handling neuroscience and behavior. I completed my PhD at Rockefeller University in the Laboratory of Social Evolution and Behavior. I developed methods for gene insertions in ants, and used these new strains of research ants to examine how ant brains perceive odors using live neural imaging. I have developed and run experiments using approaches in molecular biology, genetics, behavior, and neurobiology. My work was funded from a Kavli Neural Systems Institute Project Grant in 2016 I was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in 2017. During my time as a student, I also worked in science outreach with Rockefeller's RockEdu Science Outreach program. I also make visual art, co-created a short film in 2019, and am continually interested in the interface in arts and science.