Chemosensory Coding in Drosophila Single Sensilla

Taste Plasticity in Nutrition and Health: A Scoping Review

Taste sensation is at the intersection of nutrition and health. Our food choices are shaped by the foods we like, but our dietary habits can, in turn, influence how we sense food. This phenomenon, known as diet-induced taste plasticity, has received renewed attention as a tool for designing healthier foods and retraining eating habits. This review synthesizes emerging data from humans and model organisms to characterize how dietary environments shape taste sensation while exploring its underlying molecular and physiological mechanisms. Although there is still so much to discover about this phenomenon, accumulating evidence suggests an inverse relationship between a tastant concentration and the ability of the organism to respond to it. The effects largely depend on diet, but body weight changes play a role in specific dietary settings. Several mechanisms are at play, including receptor abundance and function, neuroendocrine signaling, gene expression, and neuroinflammation. Many open questions on mechanisms remain, including the concentration and times of exposure for effects to manifest and the consequences for nutrition and health. Beyond mechanisms, future research should explore strategies to leverage taste adaptation for healthier food design.

The gustatory receptor BdorGr43a mediated sucrose preference in the feeding of Bactrocera dorsalis

The feeding behavior of animals is pivotal for their reproductive success and energy acquisition. In our study, we found that the Bactrocera dorsalis had a pronounced preference for sucrose among six plant-derived sugars during feeding. Then, we searched the entire genome of B. dorsalis for the gustatory receptors (Grs) responsible for sucrose sensation. Putative gustatory receptors involved in the detection of sweetness, bitterness, CO2 and other unknown functions. Together with phylogenetic analysis, expression profiling, calcium imaging, and CRISPR/Cas9 mediated mutagenesis, we found that BdorGr43a is the key receptor responding to sucrose. Our study elucidated the molecular mechanism underlying the sucrose preferences in the feeding of B. dorsalis. Meanwhile, our results will serve as a reference for the understanding of gustatory sensing in insect. Furthermore, BdorGr43a may serve as an important target for the development of food attractants against the oriental fruit fly.

Glucose aversion: a behavioral resistance mechanism in the German cockroach

The German cockroach is a valuable model for research on indoor pest management strategies and for understanding mechanisms of adaptive evolution under intense anthropogenic selection. Under the selection pressure of toxic baits, populations of the German cockroach have evolved a variety of physiological and behavioral resistance mechanisms. In this review, we focus on glucose aversion, an adaptive trait that underlies a behavioral resistance to baits. Taste polymorphism, a change in taste quality of glucose from sweet to bitter, causes cockroaches to avoid glucose-containing baits. We summarize recent findings, including the contribution of glucose aversion to olfactory learning-based avoidance of baits, aversion to other sugars, and assortative mating under sexual selection, which underscores the behavioral phenotype to all oligosaccharides that contain glucose. It is a remarkable example of how anthropogenic selection drove the evolution of an altered gustatory trait that reshapes the foraging ecology and sexual communication.