Supplementary material from "Neural correlates of side-specific odour memory in mushroom body output neurons"

In all of them, the learned association can be behaviourally retrieved via contralateral stimulation, suggesting inter-hemispheric communication. However, the underlying neuronal circuits are largely unknown and neural correlates of across brain side plasticity have yet not been demonstrated.

We report neural plasticity that reflects lateral integration after side-specific odour reward conditioning. Mushroom body output neurons that did not respond initially to contralateral olfactory stimulation developed a unique and stable representation of the rewarded compound stimulus (side and odour) predicting its value during memory retention. The encoding of the reward-associated compound stimulus is delayed by about 40 ms compared with unrewarded neural activity indicating an increased computation time for the read-out after lateral integration.