Segregation of appetitive and aversive information in two tracts of the olfactory system in honey bees

LARA, AGUSTIN; MARACHLIAN EMILIANO; KLAPPENBACH, MARTÍN; LOCATELLI, FERNANDO FEDERICO

Congreso; Congreso de la Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias; 2022

A salient feature of insect´s and vertebrate´solfactory circuits is the existence of multiple neural tracts that formparallel pathways between periphery and higher brain centers. Thisneuroanatomical aspect has sparked the interest of functional and computationalapproaches that ask whether and how the parallel tracts convey differentialinformation. We investigate the role of two parallel olfactory tracts describedin the honey bee brain. In previous studies we measured odor representation inone of these tracts and found that appetitive but not aversive learning increasesthe representation of the learned odor in this tract. In a recent study we foundthat bees can recognize appetitive and aversive learned odors when both arepresented as a mixture, which suggests that appetitive and aversive odors areprocessed without getting mixed. These results lead as to postulate thatinformation about aversive and appetitive odors might be split in the antennallobe and separately relayed through the parallel olfactory tracts. To addressthis hypothesis we are performing experiments based on appetitive and aversivelearning and evaluating the effect of lesioning one of both tracts. The tractsare stained after behavioural experiments to validate the specificity of thelesion. Results obtained until now show that lesion of the medial tract doesnot impair behaviour elicited by appetitive learned odors while lesion of thelateral tract does. Next experiments are focused the reveal the role of bothtracts in aversive olfactory learning.