Dr. Molly Stanely University of Vermont Chacterizing a unique subset of taste cells in Drosophila melanogaster All animals must continually make important feeding decisions. Chemosensory neural circuits, such as those for taste and smell, play a key role in directing feeding behaviors. The sensing of food chemicals by specialized sensory taste cells (gustation) helps animals evaluate potential food sources to encourage consumption of nutritive compounds while avoiding potentially harmful compounds. While the cellular and molecular mechanisms for encoding some taste modalities are relatively well-understood, such as ‘sweet’ and ‘bitter’, other taste modalities are more complex, such as ‘salty’ and ‘umami’. The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, offers unparalleled genetic tools to answer neurobiological questions and I have recently used this model organism to help uncover the molecular and cellular mechanisms of salt taste and feeding. While creating a comprehensive map of taste cells on the fly labellum for this project, a unique subset of chemosensory cells with an unknown function were identified. In this seminar, I will share recent work that aims to characterize the activation profile of these taste cells and understand the functional impact of these sensory cells on feeding behaviors.
Comments are closed.
|
Categories
All
Archives
April 2024
|