Fig. 2: Silencing of the SNc impairs striatal tone responses during auditory discrimination.

a Schematic for simultaneous microendoscopic imaging of the auditory striatum and nigrostriatal chemogenetic inhibition. b Top, representative field-of-view imaging the auditory striatum. Bottom, representative corresponding detected traces. c Left, heatmaps and averaged trace of an example tone-responsive neuronal ROI aligned to tone onset (data are mean ± SEM). Right, Pie chart depicting the distribution of responsive neuronal ROIs. ROIs with significantly (p < 0.05) higher response profiles following different task variables: tones, white noise (in early withdrawal trials), reward (incorrect trials), or no reward (in error trials) are quantified. ‘Other’ refers to neurons with no significant responses to task variables. d Top, cellular registration and activity maps of an example ROI when administering vehicle (red) or CNO (green) prior to the auditory task. Bottom, individual change in mean tone-evoked response per neuronal ROI in vehicle and CNO contexts. e Peak trace response across registered neuronal ROIs for the vehicle (red) and CNO (green) contexts. Bars are mean and individual dots represent values from each neuron. n = 21 neurons from 3 mice from each group *p = 0.0157, **p = 0.0032, n.s. p = 0.7652, two-sided Mann–Whitney U test. f–i Averaged tone trace response of example neuronal ROIs in vehicle (red) and CNO (green) sessions for high frequency (f), low frequency (g), 1 evidence strength (h), and 0 evidence strength (i) stimuli. Data for F-I are mean ± SEM. j Averaged peak neuronal ROI responses towards evidence strength + /− 1 and 0 during vehicle injected sessions (n = 39 neuronal ROIs; **p = 0.0098, two-sided Mann–Whitney U test). k Averaged peak neuronal ROI responses towards evidence strength + /− 1 and 0 during CNO injected sessions (n = 36 neuronal ROIs, n.s., p = 0.80, two-sided Mann–Whitney U test). l Change in fluorescence induced by CNO for evidence strength + /− 1 and 0 trials (n = 16 neuronal ROIs; * p = 0.028, two-sided Mann–Whitney U test). Data for J-L are mean ± SEM.