{"doi":"10.1016/j.cell.2023.05.025","title":"Sparse and stereotyped encoding implicates a core glomerulus for ant alarm behavior","abstract":"Ants communicate via large arrays of pheromones and possess expanded, highly complex olfactory systems, with antennal lobes in the brain comprising up to ∼500 glomeruli. This expansion implies that odors could activate hundreds of glomeruli, which would pose challenges for higher-order processing. To study this problem, we generated transgenic ants expressing the genetically encoded calcium indicator GCaMP in olfactory sensory neurons. Using two-photon imaging, we mapped complete glomerular responses to four ant alarm pheromones. Alarm pheromones robustly activated ≤6 glomeruli, and activity maps for the three pheromones inducing panic alarm in our study species converged on a single glomerulus. These results demonstrate that, rather than using broadly tuned combinatorial encoding, ants employ precise, narrowly tuned, and stereotyped representations of alarm pheromones. The identification of a central sensory hub glomerulus for alarm behavior suggests that a simple neural architecture is sufficient to translate pheromone perception into behavioral outputs.","journal":"Cell","year":2023,"id":321945,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":42,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9506,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":294898,"name":"Dominic D. Frank","orcid":"0000-0002-9790-4051","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":346114,"name":"Lindsey E. Lopes","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":479939,"name":"Leonora Olivos-Cisneros","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":989607,"name":"Kip D. Lacy","orcid":"0000-0002-3149-8927","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":478675,"name":"Waring Trible","orcid":"0000-0003-1405-5902","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":989608,"name":"Amelia L. Ritger","orcid":"0000-0003-2338-6439","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":883072,"name":"Stephany Valdés-Rodríguez","orcid":null,"position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":478677,"name":"Daniel J. C. Kronauer","orcid":"0000-0002-4103-7729","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":688917,"name":"Taylor Hart","orcid":"0000-0001-9692-8150","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":138,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:07:37.596550Z","pmid":"37321218","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}