Fig. 3. Two distinct populations of LH^LepR neurons encode seeking and consummatory behaviours.

a Schematic of virus injection/GRIN lens insertion for micro-endoscopic calcium imaging in the LH from LepR-cre mice. b Schematic of the multi-phase test 2. Seeking with consummatory behaviours, in the presence of food (left). Seeking without consummatory behaviours, in the absence of food (right). c Representative single-cell traces of LH^LepR neurons within several trials (left) and one trial (right). Green shaded box indicated seeking behaviours and purple shaded box indicated consummatory behaviours. d Three-dimensional scored plot of LH^LepR neurons. e Proportion of cell populations. f, j Representative contour map of seeking (f, green) and consummatory (j, purple) neurons of an accepted cell (top). The degree of colour brightness represents the cell activity degree (max Z-score) (bottom). g, k Representative single-cell traces of LH^LepR neurons of seeking (g) and consummatory (k) neurons during food and no-food trials. h, i, l, m Heatmap depicting the calcium signals (top) and average Z-scores (bottom) of seeking neurons (h, i) or consummatory neurons (l, m). The magnitude of the calcium signals corresponds to its colour density. (4 mice, 15 cells (h, i), 4 mice, 25 cells (l, m)). Data are mean ± s.e.m. See Supplementary Table 1 for statistics. Source data are provided as a Source data file. The schematics in a and b were created using BioRender.