Research Projects

Understanding how specific taste neuronal circuits influence feeding behaviors When the balance between hunger and satiety is perturbed, food intake gets misregulated leading to excessive or insufficient eating. In humans, abnormal nutrient consumption causes metabolic conditions like obesity (causing 3 million deaths/year) and eating disorders. Despite this burden on society, we currently lack enough knowledge about the neuronal pathways, circuits and genes that regulate appetite. By exploiting the gustatory system of the flies, we are interested in understanding how the taste information is wired in the brain and how it is modulated by intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Drosophila can sense the same taste stimuli as mammals, including sugars, sour, water, salts, umami, alcohols and bitter tastes. These compounds facilitate acceptance or avoidance behaviors. By using experimental strategies involving molecular, behavioral, genetic, calcium imaging and electrophysiological approaches we are interested in dissecting the taste neural circuits (especially higher order taste neurons) that convey taste information to the brain and are involved in simple feeding behaviors like acceptance or rejection of food. Our group is interested in the gustatory system of Drosophila to understand the feeding behavior, taste circuits and their modulation to achieve the main objectives (1) how specific neuronal circuits influence-feeding behaviors (2) how taste information at the periphery and central nervous system is modulated and (3) identifying the neuronal pathways that regulate satiety.