Motor control in a Drosophila taste circuit

By M. D. Gordon, Kristin Scott. 2009

520 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Tastes elicit innate behaviors critical for directing animals to ingest nutritious substances and reject toxic compounds, but the neural basis of these behaviors is not understood. Here, we use a neural silencing screen to identify neurons required for a simple Drosophila taste behavior, and characterize a neural population that controls a specific subprogram of this behavior. By silencing and activating subsets of the defined cell population, we identify the neurons involved in the taste behavior as a pair of motor neurons located in the subesophageal ganglion (SOG). The motor neurons are activated by sugar stimulation of gustatory neurons and inhibited by bitter compounds; however, experiments utilizing split-GFP detect no direct connections between the motor neurons and primary sensory neurons, indicating that further study will be necessary to elucidate the circuitry bridging these populations. Combined, these results provide a general strategy and a valuable starting point for future taste circuit analysis.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Ecology, Immunology

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Citations in the corpus

Coordinated and Compartmentalized Neuromodulation Shapes Sensory Processing in Drosophila (2015, neutral): “HMC02893, generated by the TRiP at Harvard Medical School (NIH/NIGMS R01-GM084947)) (Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center); MB247-DsRed (Riemensperger et al., 2005) (gift from Andre Fiala, University of Göttingen); MB247-LexA (Pitman et al., 2011) (gift from Scott Waddell, University of Oxford); LexA”
Refinement of Tools for Targeted Gene Expression in Drosophila (2010, background): “In such two component systems, one transgenic construct drives the expression of a site-specific transcriptional activator and a second construct contains its binding sites positioned upstream of a responder gene.”
A single pair of neurons links sleep to memory consolidation in Drosophila melanogaster (2015, unknown): “, 2003), ptub>GAL80> (Gordon and Scott, 2009), LexAOP-Flp (Shang et al.”
Common Sense about Taste: From Mammals to Insects (2009, background): “Each gustatory neuron extends a dendrite to a terminal pore at the tip of the bristle shaft and an axonal process that terminates primarily in the subesophageal ganglion (SOG).”
Reward signal in a recurrent circuit drives appetitive long-term memory formation (2015, unknown): “UAS-CD4::spGFP1-10 and LexAop-CD4::spGFP11 are described in Gordon and Scott (2009).”
Activity of Defined Mushroom Body Output Neurons Underlies Learned Olfactory Behavior in Drosophila (2015, methodology): “GRASP experiments were performed as described (Gordon and Scott, 2009; Pitman et al., 2011).”
A pair of inhibitory neurons are required to sustain labile memory in the Drosophila mushroom body (2011, unknown): “We also used GRASP to visualize contact between APL and DPM neurons using NP5288-GAL4 for APL and L0111-LexA for DPM (Figure 4E; Figure S2; Movie S2).”
Genetic manipulation of genes and cells in the nervous system of the fruit fly (2011, methodology): “elegans and imported to Drosophila (Feinberg et al., 2008; Gordon and Scott, 2009).”
Mushroom body efferent neurons responsible for aversive olfactory memory retrieval in Drosophila (2011, background): “For single-cell analyses driving the membrane and presynaptic markers (mCD8::GFP and Syt::HA), UAS-mCD8::GFP UAS-Syt::HA hsp70-flp females were crossed to NP2492; Tub > GAL80 > (II) males (ref”
Cell-type Specific Labeling of Synapses in vivo through Synaptic Tagging with Recombination (STaR) (2014, methodology): “The initial adaptation of GRASP to Drosophila used the general trans- membrane protein CD4 to tether the two split GFP fragments (spGFP1-10 and spGFP11) and was used to detect cell-cell contacts (Gordon and Scott, 2009).”