Kevin Franks
Duke University, NC·Neuroscience
The sense of smell helps animals find food, avoid danger and recognize what they have met before. How the brain turns a sniff into recognition, memory and a decision is still poorly understood.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biology
- Topics
olfaction
sense of smell
piriform cortex
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Mar 2030
What they work on
- Test whether piriform cortex neurons jointly encode olfactory bulb input and breathing phase, by delivering brief optogenetic light pulses to different olfactory bulb spots timed to respiration in awake, head-fixed mice.
- Probe what produces breathing-phase tuning in piriform cortex, using targeted circuit perturbations. The tests ask whether tuning comes from the animal's own sniffing, whether feedback inhibition sharpens it, and whether recurrent circuits spread preferences across the sniff cycle.
- Determine whether piriform cortex responses to real odors are phase-locked, by testing whether neurons that respond to several odors show different response sizes but identical timing.
- Test whether semilunar cells discriminate odors and pyramidal cells generalize across similar odors, by recording identified cells while trained mice smell morphing mixtures of two odorants.
- Silence semilunar or pyramidal cells with viral tools in transgenic mice just before odor memories are learned or recalled, to find which cell type each stage of memory needs.
- Test whether Tbr1 pyramidal neurons send odor identity, but not odor value, directly to medial prefrontal cortex, and whether identity and value combine there through strengthened connections.
More about the research
This work centers on the piriform cortex (PCx), the main olfactory region of the brain's outer layer. It receives signals from the olfactory bulb (OB), the first relay station for smell. The two projects ask complementary questions. One asks how the timing of breathing structures odor signals in PCx. The other asks how different PCx cell types carry out discrimination, memory and value.
Why it matters
Loss of smell, or anosmia, became widespread with COVID-19. It can be dangerous and can harm emotional well-being. Smell and odor-memory problems are also linked to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. Understanding how the healthy brain codes odors could reveal how these processes fail in disease. It could eventually inform diagnosis of sensory processing disorders and the design of artificial sensing systems.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Minghong Ma
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Neuroscience
Test whether olfactory epithelium inflammation or smell-neuron inactivation from adolescence to adulthood alters prefrontal pyramidal neurons in mice, using patch clamp recordings, and reverse effects with chemogenetic activation of olfactory-prefrontal circuits.
Norbert Hajos
Indiana University, IN·Neuroscience
Test whether VIP interneurons, cortical cells that release GABA to inhibit other inhibitory cells, form functionally distinct groups by recording their spiking after foot shocks and reward delivery in awake mice.
Bradley Goldstein
Duke University, NC·Neuroscience
Map the axes of gene-expression variation across human olfactory sensory neurons by single-cell RNA sequencing of nasal biopsies from people with normal smell and from people with objectively measured smell loss.
The school
Duke University: 61 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 417 research doctorates a year.
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