Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2015 Nov 25;6:316. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2015.00316

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

Copyright © 2015 Junca and Sandoz.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

PMC Copyright notice

Working model of aversive olfactory conditioning of SER using a thermal US. Putative pathways involved in (A) the expression of SER after thermal stimulation, (B) the acquired SER after learning a CS-US association, are shown. (A) At the periphery, stimulation of the different structures with a high temperature is thought to activate thermosensitive neurons (possibly class IV multidendritic neurons), which would first project to the respective relays on the ventral nerve cord, the subesophageal ganglion (SEG), thoracic ganglia (TG), or abdominal ganglia (AG). As a second step, interneurons would project to a thermal/nociceptive center (TNC) in the brain. Antennal thermal stimulation induces activity in the antennal lobe (AL) but possibly also activates the TNC. Activation of this center would stimulate premotor descending neurons (DN) which would in turn trigger stinging motor patterns in the terminal abdominal ganglion (TAG), producing SER (Ogawa et al., 1995). (B) Olfactory learning: odorants are detected on the antenna by olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) projecting to the AL. Then information is prominently conveyed to the mushroom bodies (MB) by projection neurons (PN). Activation of dopaminergic neurons (dopN) by the TNC would inform the olfactory pathway of the aversive thermal reinforcement. Associative plasticity at the level of MB extrinsic neurons (EN) feeding onto the sting premotor descending neurons would allow the CS to elicit SER after learning.