DOI: 10.5061/dryad.qbzkh18sc
title: Honey bee antennal lobe calcium imaging

description: Odour processing exhibits multiple parallels between vertebrate and
 invertebrate olfactory systems. Insects, in particular, have emerged as
 relevant models for olfactory studies because of the tractability of their
 olfactory circuits. Here, we used fast calcium imaging to track the
 activity of projection neurons in the honey bee antennal lobe (AL) during
 olfactory stimulation at high temporal resolution. We observed a
 heterogeneity of response profiles and an abundance of inhibitory
 activities, resulting in various response latencies and stimulus-specific
 post-odour neural signatures. Recorded calcium signals were fed to a
 mushroom body (MB) model constructed implementing the fundamental features
 of connectivity between olfactory projection neurons, Kenyon cells (KC),
 and MB output neurons (MBON). The model accounts for the increase of
 odorant discrimination in the MB compared to the AL and reveals the
 recruitment of two distinct KC populations that represent odorants and
 their aftersmell as two separate but temporally coherent neural objects.
 Finally, we showed that the learning-induced modulation of KC-to-MBON
 synapses can explain both the variations in associative learning scores
 across different conditioning protocols used in bees and the bees'
 response latency. Thus, it provides a simple explanation of how the time
 contingency between the stimulus and the reward can be encoded without the
 need for time tracking. This study broadens our understanding of olfactory
 coding and learning in honey bees. It demonstrates that a model based on
 simple MB connectivity rules and fed with real physiological data can
 explain fundamental aspects of odour processing and associative learning.
description: Honey bee antennal lobe ouptu neurons have been labelled with
 Fura-2-dextran. Imaging was conducted with a Leica SP8 LSM. Data was
 processed in MatLab.
description: # Honey bee antennal lobe calcium imaging
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.qbzkh18sc](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.qbzkh18sc) This database comprises the data used for the analysis in Paoli et al., eLife (2024). It provides a set of honey bee antennal lobe calcium imaging recordings for 8 bees exposed to 3 odorants for 20 trials. ## Description of the data and file structure The database (**db**) is in the form of a MatLab structure comprising: * **db.allmaps** (described in **db.allmaps_legend**) contains the average response maps (64x64 pixels) for each olfactory stimulus (3 odorants) for 8 bees. * **db.odors** (described in **db.odor_legend**) contains the name of the odorants used for the stimulations * **db.bee** (described in **db.bee_legend**) contains 8 cells (one for each bee). Each cell has dimensions glomeuli-by-odorant-by-trial-by-time. Time is from 3s before odor onset to 20 s after odor onset. Calcium signal is recorded as relative change with respect to the pre-stimulus baseline (deltaF/F) * **db.fs** contains the acquisition frequency rate used for each bee * **db.xy** contains the x and y coordinates on the response maps (**db.allmaps**) used to extract glomerular information