Flies are known for their ability to chase sweet nutritious calories. In fact, they are good at avoiding potentially toxic and bitter food, and hunting sweet and nutritious food, like an expert foodie. But how do they do that so effectively? How does their brain work to make this choice?
To find answers to these questions, researchers at Yale University looked inside the brains of these tiny taste-hunters. Scientists presented hungry fruit flies with two options — sweet and nutritious food wrapped in bitter quinine, and not bitter but less sweet food with fewer calories. The trickery was done to make the choices tough so that scientists could observe how flies’ brains respond to the sensory conflict.
When the flies were making their choices, scientists looked at their brains’ functioning using neural imaging. They found that the choices the fruit flies made depended on how hungry they were. “The hungrier they are, the more likely they will tolerate bitter taste to obtain more calories,” said Michael Nitabach, the senior author of the research, in a statement. The study was published on July 5 in Nature Communications.
According to scientists, flies relay the information they receive through their senses to a portion of their brain which scientists call ‘fan-shaped body’. At this place, signals are integrated and an executive decision is made that will be relayed back to the organs to be acted upon. Researchers found that when new food choices were introduced, the activity of the neurons in the fan-shaped body adapted to new choices, in turn, affecting the decision.
When scientists manipulated the activity of neurons in the fan-shaped body, they were able to change the decision of the flies. This means that they were able to force hungry flies to eat less calorie food, opposite to their usual behaviour. Scientists say that the experiment demonstrated that the choice of food is actually a feedback loop rather than being a top-down decision. In other terms, the decision of what to eat appears to be controlled more by neurochemistry than anything else. Scientists believe that the experiment sets a template using which we could also understand how hunger and emotional states influence humans’ food choices.
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