Plasticity of olfactory bulb inputs mediated by dendritic NMDA-spikes in piriform cortex

The piriform cortex (PCx) is essential for learning of odor information. The current view postulates odor learning in the PCx is mainly due to plasticity in intracortical (IC) synapses, while odor information from the olfactory bulb carried via the lateral olfactory tract (LOT) is “hardwired”. Here we revisit this notion by studying location and pathway dependent plasticity rules. We find that in contrast to the prevailing view, synaptic and optogenetically activated LOT synapses undergo strong and robust long-term potentiation (LTP) mediated by only few local NMDA-spikes delivered at theta frequency, while global spike timing dependent plasticity protocols (STDP) failed to induce LTP in these distal synapses. An inverse result was observed for more proximal apical IC synapses; they undergo plasticity with STDP but are refractive to local NMDA-spike protocols. These results are consistent with a self-potentiating mechanism of odor information via NMDA-spikes which can form branch-specific memory traces of odors.