Fig. 7: Ventral striatum neuron activity is coupled with sniffing.

ai Continuous recording of intranasal respiration (blue, inhale = upward deflection) along with single-unit activity from three example units in the TuS (aii = magnified inset). Shaded boxes = non-novel odor delivery. Red line = z-scored root mean square (RMS) of the respiration. b Distribution of respiratory frequencies from the mice (n = 3) during both spontaneous and odor-delivery periods. ci Spike raster plots from the three units in (a). cii Averaged peri-stimulus time histogram of all units aligned to sniffing (n = 19, mean ± SEM; 50 ms bins). di The relationship between respiration and firing frequency for one unit (n = 167 trials, each data point was jittered between −0.25 to 0.25 on x-axis for visualization), with linear regression. dii Boxplot showing that more spikes occur (n = 19 units, across 3 mice) during high versus low frequency respiration, and that this was greater when animals spontaneously transitioned into sniffing during the inter-trial interval than when sniffing during an odor. ei and eii Normalized instantaneous respiratory frequency relative to either the first spike or final spike of all units (n = 19 single units obtained from the three mice, ei or eii, respectively). ***= (repeated measure ANOVA, p < 0.0001, pairwise comparison, p < 0.05; see Results). The boxplot displays the median, the first and third quartiles (edges of the box), and the whiskers, which represent the data extremes. All statistical tests are two-sided. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.