Fig. 8: Representation of odor valence in the PN activity.

a Behavioral chamber for evaluating the innate attractiveness and aversiveness of odors in A. aegypti. The right panel shows the top view of the chamber. The sliding door (brown) is shown halfway inside the main chamber to indicate how it compartmentalizes the main chamber when it is pushed inside (it is fully open during the experiment and pushed fully inside at the end of the experiment). Female mosquitoes were placed in the release chamber 30 min before the experiment. At the start of the experiment, a rotating door separating the release chamber and main chamber was opened. One side of the main chamber was flushed with odorized air and the other side with clean air. After 5 min, the sliding double door was closed, and the mosquitoes on each side were counted to calculate a preference index. b Preference index (PI) for 14 monomolecular odors. P values are calculated from two-sided signed-rank test comparing PI to 0; insignificant P values are not displayed; n (number of repeated experiments) is indicated above each plot. Black lines: means, error bars: s.e.m. c Difference in preference indices (PI) is positively correlated with the difference in PN responses for odor pairs (Pearson Correlation R = 0.24, P = 0.02, n = 91 odor pairs). d The behavior–PN correlation increases with the number of PNs used in the analysis (Pearson Correlation R = 0.9, P = 3.2 × 10⁻²⁴, n = 46). Source data for (b–d) are provided as a Source Data file.