Fig. 6. ZI DA neurons responded to food approach and consumption.

(A) AAV was injected into ZI of TH-Cre mice to express GCaMP or EGFP in ZI DA neurons for fiber-photometry imaging of ZI DA neurons associated with food approach and consumption. (B) GCaMP7f was expressed in ZI DA neurons of TH-Cre mice. (C) Heatmap of normalized z-scores of ZI DA neuron activity from 108 feeding trials of ZI^TH-GCaMP mice (n = 6). (D) z-scores of ZI DA neurons aligned to the time of pellet retrieval from 85 feeding trials of control ZI^TH-EGFP mice and 108 trials of ZI^TH-GCaMP mice. (E) Increase in z-scores for food approach and decease during food consumption compared to 5 s before food retrieval in ZI^TH-GCaMP (n = 6) but not ZI^TH-EGFP mice (n = 5). Two-way RM ANOVA with post hoc Bonferroni test. (F) A diagram showing that AAV was injected into ZI of TH-Cre mice to express GCaMP in ZI DA neurons for fiber-photometry tests following refeeding. (G) Heatmaps of normalized z-scores of ZI DA neuron activity from refeeding trials of five fasted ZI^TH-GCaMP mice. (H) z-scores of ZI DA neurons aligned to the time of food delivery for refeeding from five fasted ZI^TH-GCaMP mice. (I) Bar graph with data plots showing the averages of z-score at the different time points before and after refeeding (n = 5 mice). One-way RM ANOVA with post hoc Bonferroni test.