Analysis of non-olfactory sensory pathways that are necessary for the olfactory associative learning of the Drosophila mushroom body

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The mushroom body is known to be an important center for associative olfactory memory in the insect brain. To understand the neural pathways of information other than the olfactory signals toward this center, we first analyzed the organization of the primary gustatory center, whose structure was hardly known despite the importance of gustatory information in associative olfactory learning. We also analyzed the neural connections of the brain regions that receive the arborizations of the input/output neurons of the mushroom body. By systematically labeling neurons according to cell lineage, we found that no neurons from the gustatory, auditory and visual centers directly project to these regions and that there are distinct regions that receive the projections from putative higher-associative centers.