Insect odorant receptors are molecular targets of the insect repellent DEET.

DEET (N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide) is the world's most widely used topical insect repellent, with broad effectiveness against most insects. Its mechanism of action and molecular target remain unknown. Here, we show that DEET blocks electrophysiological responses of olfactory sensory neurons to attractive odors in Anopheles gambiae and Drosophila melanogaster.

Sparsening and temporal sharpening of olfactory representations in the honeybee mushroom bodies.

We explored the transformations accompanying the transmission of odor information from the first-order processing area, the antennal lobe, to the mushroom body, a higher-order integration center in the insect brain. Using Ca2+ imaging, we recorded activity in the dendrites of the projection neurons that connect the antennal lobe with the mushroom body. Next, we recorded the presynaptic terminals of these projection neurons.

Odor similarity does not influence the time needed for odor processing.

The brain's link between perception and action involves several steps, which include stimulus transduction, neuronal coding of the stimulus, comparison to a memory template and choice of an appropriate behavioral response. All of these need time, and many studies report that the time needed to compare two stimuli correlates inversely with the perceived distance between them. We developed a behavioral assay in which we tested the time that a honeybee needs to discriminate between odors consisting of mixtures of two components, and included both very similar and very different stimuli spanning four log-concentration ranges.