Grant: Project Grant

The sense of taste is critical to health. Taste drives us to consume specific nutrients like sweet carbohydrates or savory amino acids, and avoid foods that may be unripe (sour), spoiled, or contain potentially toxic compounds that we perceive as bitter. Making the correct food choices is so essential to survival that the taste system evolved to produce intense pleasure in response to palatable tastes and equally intense aversion to unpalatable tastes. This confers a clear survival advantage in situations where resources are scarce and food is of unknown quality. However, many people now enjoy relatively unfettered access to extremely palatable high-calorie foods. In this context, the pleasures from taste can result in another significant detriment to health - overconsumption. The proposed research project is focused on discovering fundamental principles of how the brain processes taste information and translates it into feeding behavior. We will study this problem in the fruit fly model system, because the relative simplicity of the fly brain, combined with a wealth of available genetic and optical tools, allows us to probe neural circuit function with higher resolution and more complete coverage than is currently possible in mammalian systems. Additionally, understanding fly taste has direct applications in controlling diseases spread by biting insects. We have three objectives: 1) To uncover the neural circuit mechanisms driving integration of different tastes. 2) To delineate the mechanisms underlying need-dependent changes in taste perception. 3) To translate our findings into an important insect vector of human diseases. Understanding how taste drives animals to consume calorie-dense foods will lead to new tools and strategies to prevent overconsumption and obesity. Uncovering specific mechanisms that affect insect taste sensitivity and feeding behavior will also lead to new approaches to combat insect-borne diseases, such as malaria.