Taste sensing and sugar detection mechanisms in Drosophila larval primary taste center
Abstract
Despite the small number of gustatory sense neurons, Drosophila larvae are able to sense a wide range of chemicals. Although evidence for taste multimodality has been provided in single neurons, an overview of gustatory responses at the periphery is missing and hereby we explore whole-organ calcium imaging of the external taste center. We find that neurons can be activated by different combinations of taste modalities including of opposite hedonic valence and identify distinct temporal dynamics of response. Although sweet sensing has not been fully characterized so far in the external larval gustatory organ, we recorded responses elicited by sugar. Previous findings established that larval sugar sensing relies on the Gr43a pharyngeal receptor, but the question remains if external neurons contribute to this taste. Here we postulate that external and internal gustation use distinct and complementary mechanisms in sugar sensing and we identify external sucrose sensing neurons.
Data availability
All data is available as part of the submitted manuscript.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (310030_188471)
- Simon G Sprecher
Novartis Stiftung für Medizinisch-Biologische Forschung (18A017)
- Simon G Sprecher
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2021, Maier et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 2,179
- views
-
- 350
- downloads
-
- 9
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
When observing others’ behaviors, we continuously integrate their movements with the corresponding sounds to enhance perception and develop adaptive responses. However, how the human brain integrates these complex audiovisual cues based on their natural temporal correspondence remains unclear. Using electroencephalogram (EEG), we demonstrated that rhythmic cortical activity tracked the hierarchical rhythmic structures in audiovisually congruent human walking movements and footstep sounds. Remarkably, the cortical tracking effects exhibit distinct multisensory integration modes at two temporal scales: an additive mode in a lower-order, narrower temporal integration window (step cycle) and a super-additive enhancement in a higher-order, broader temporal window (gait cycle). Furthermore, while neural responses at the lower-order timescale reflect a domain-general audiovisual integration process, cortical tracking at the higher-order timescale is exclusively engaged in the integration of biological motion cues. In addition, only this higher-order, domain-specific cortical tracking effect correlates with individuals’ autistic traits, highlighting its potential as a neural marker for autism spectrum disorder. These findings unveil the multifaceted mechanism whereby rhythmic cortical activity supports the multisensory integration of human motion, shedding light on how neural coding of hierarchical temporal structures orchestrates the processing of complex, natural stimuli across multiple timescales.
-
- Evolutionary Biology
- Neuroscience
The first complete 3D reconstruction of the compound eye of a minute wasp species sheds light on the nuts and bolts of size reduction.