Mechanosensory neurons control sweet sensing in Drosophila.

Yong Taek Jeong,Soo Min Oh,Jeong Taeg Seo,Jaewon Shim,Seok Jun Moon,Jae Young Kwon

doi:10.1038/ncomms12872

Yong Taek Jeong, Soo Min Oh + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12872

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Abstract

Animals discriminate nutritious food from toxic substances using their sense of taste. Since taste perception requires taste receptor cells to come into contact with water-soluble chemicals, it is a form of contact chemosensation. Concurrent with that contact, mechanosensitive cells detect the texture of food and also contribute to the regulation of feeding. Little is known, however, about the extent to which chemosensitive and mechanosensitive circuits interact. Here, we show Drosophila prefers soft food at the expense of sweetness and that this preference requires labellar mechanosensory neurons (MNs) and the mechanosensory channel Nanchung. Activation of these labellar MNs causes GABAergic inhibition of sweet-sensing gustatory receptor neurons, reducing the perceived intensity of a sweet stimulus. These findings expand our understanding of the ways different sensory modalities cooperate to shape animal behaviour.

Highlights

Animals discriminate nutritious food from toxic substances using their sense of taste
While Drosophila olfactory sensilla lack mechanosensory neurons (MNs)[7], the gustatory receptor neurons (GRNs) of each taste sensillum are accompanied by a MN8
We have discovered Drosophila prefer soft food at the expense of sweetness and that this preference depends on labellar MNs and their expression of the mechanosensory channel Nanchung

Summary

Introduction

Animals discriminate nutritious food from toxic substances using their sense of taste. Psychologists and neuroscientists have begun to explore the ways the individual channels of sensory input affect the perception of flavour, but our understanding of cross-modal interactions lags behind This is partly due to difficulties with parsing the individual components that make up the gestalt of flavour perception, and partly due to technical difficulties associated with the controlled delivery of precisely defined multimodal stimuli. Hollowood et al.[4] found in a group of human volunteers a negative correlation between food viscosity and perceived sweetness; as a food’s viscosity increases, we perceive it as being less sweet Since these sorts of interactions exist, they presumably offer some utility, but the neural mechanisms by which they help coordinate appropriate feeding behaviours are not understood in any system. The molecular genetic tools available in the fly allow us to examine the role each type of sensory information plays in directing feeding behaviour via selective activation or inactivation of each class of sensory neuron

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