Short- and long-term adaptation in olfactory transduction as a leaky integral feedback

Complex sensory systems such as the olfactory transduction pathway considered in this paper are known to exhibit two distinct types of adaptation: long term adaptation in response to step-like stimulations and short-term adaptation in response to sequences of pulse-like stimuli. We show in this paper that perfect adaptation models such as the integral feedback scheme are unable to explain both these phenomena simultaneously, but that a leaky integral feedback (i.e., a dynamical compensator including also a slow degradation term) reproduces well all experimental data available.