Past Student Profile
Amir Choudhary
Tel: 0191 222 8946
Email: amir.choudhary@ncl.ac.uk
Website: http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/jeri.wright/
Research Interests
It is important for an animal to be able to detect odours. But natural odours are composed of hundreds of different volatile compounds. Recent work in olfactory coding has attempted to characterise the molecular features of these compounds and how they affect the percept of the odour. For example, there appears to be an affect of carbon chain length on odour quality, such that animals like bees can be trained to distinguish between odourants that differ in this dimension. We also know that odour intensity affects its percept. But this presents a problem for a foraging animal. If you are foraging you may want to be able to recognise a specific odour, but equally you may want to be able to characterise concentration differences in that odour, for example – to follow an odour to its source. How does an animal resolve this problem and what are the limits of this ability? These are things that I am interested in and that I am investigating, using bees, for my PhD.
Project
Using Olfactory learning to investigate how the perceptual quality of an odour is affected by its intensity, identity or its context
