The sense of taste carries evolutionary benefits key to survival. A sweet taste, for instance, signals energy-dense nutrients important to animals foraging for food — including humans. A bitter taste may warn of a toxic substance.
“We use our sense of taste to decide what to eat and how much to eat,” says Anita Devineni, a neuroscientist and assistant professor in Emory University’s Department of Biology.
Despite the importance of taste, little is known about how taste cues spark the firing of cells across a brain and evoke a variety of behavioral responses. Devineni is exploring this mystery by mapping the neural circuitry for the taste system of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.
Tinier than a poppy seed, the fruit fly brain contains around 140,000 neurons.
“That’s 1,000 fewer neurons than a mouse brain and a million times fewer than a human brain,” Devineni explains, making the fly brain a simple starting point for studying general mechanistic principles of cognition.
Compared to the incredible complexity of its cognitive powers, the human brain’s basic biology appears relatively straightforward.
“The brain is just an organ like any other organ in your body,” Devineni says. “It’s made up of neurons that are cells like any other cells — lipid membranes containing proteins, DNA and other molecules. What makes a brain cell different from a skin cell or a lung cell is that a brain cell fires. Firing means that sodium ions flow in and out of the cell. Everything that you do, from thinking to talking to walking, is a result of patterns of neurons firing. How could this be?”
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