Fig. 5: Female line-attractor dynamics encoded sexual receptivity across days.

a, Illustration of the longitudinal imaging strategy across oestrus states of naturally cycling female mice (left), and example longitudinal imaging planes and traces from one female (right). Units were sorted by temporal correlation. The colour scale indicates z-scored activity. b, Time constants of the VMHvl α-cell dynamical system on 1 unreceptive day. c, Line-attractor scores for dynamical systems fit during receptive and unreceptive days (n = 4 mice, mean ± s.e.m. of 0.05 ± 0.02 (unreceptive) and 1.9 ± 0.2 (receptive); *P < 0.05, Mann–Whitney U-test, P = 0.02). d, Low-dimensional principal components of a VMHvl α-cell rSLDS fit model on a unreceptive day. Principal components show fast time-locked dynamics and lack ramping and persistence. e, Flow field of the VMHvl α-cell dynamical system on an unreceptive day. f, Same as panel e, but showing neural trajectories in the state space coloured by time and behaviours. g, Schematic showing the projection of neural activity from an unreceptive day into the fit dynamical system from a receptive day. h, Dynamics of integration dimension in the VMHvl discovered during a receptive day (same example trial as shown in Fig. 3d) compared with activity of the same dimension on unreceptive days. i, Illustration of the longitudinal imaging strategy across oestrus states of naturally cycling females with oestrogen injection. j, Accepting behaviours displayed in mating interactions across days from one example female. k, Scatter plots of the integration dimension values and the amount of female accepting behaviours (n = 50 trials) in each trials. Data are presented as mean ± s.e.m. l, The integration dimension activity aligned to the first male contact, in high-receptivity, medium-receptivity or low-receptivity trials, as defined in k. ****P < 0.0001, Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-rank test. Data are presented as mean ± s.e.m.