Recent studies find that sugar tastes less intense to humans with obesity, but whether this
sensory change is a cause or a consequence of obesity is unclear. To tackle this question …

Feeding behavior is influenced primarily by two factors: nutritional needs and food
palatability. However, the role of food deprivation and metabolic needs in the selection of …

Animals use gustatory information to assess the suitability of potential food sources and
make critical decisions on what to consume. For example, the taste of sugar generally …

Sugars are important energy sources, but high sugar intake poses a metabolic challenge
and leads to diseases. Drosophila melanogaster is a generalist fruit breeder that encounters …

The gustatory system provides vital sensory information to determine feeding and appetitive
learning behaviors. Very little is known, however, about higher-order gustatory circuits in the …

Food choice, in animals, has been known to change with internal nutritional state and also
with variable dietary conditions. To better characterize mechanisms of diet-induced plasticity …

Identification of nutritious compounds is dependent on expression of specific taste receptors
in appropriate taste-cell types [1]. In contrast to mammals, which rely on a single, broadly …

The sense of taste is critical in determining the nutritional suitability of foods. Sweet and
bitter are primary taste modalities in mammals, and their behavioral relevance is similar in …

The fly pharyngeal sense organs lie at the transition between external and internal nutrient-
sensing mechanisms. Here we investigate the function of pharyngeal sweet gustatory …

Nutrient deprivation can lead to dramatic changes in feeding behavior, including acceptance
of foods that are normally rejected. In flies, this behavioral shift depends in part on reciprocal …