Our taste connectome paper is published!

We’re excited that our paper analyzing the architecture of Drosophila taste circuits has now been published in Scientific Reports (link here)! This is a revised version of the paper that we posted on bioRxiv last fall. This study was led by co-first authors Sydney Walker, an Emory undergraduate majoring in Quantitative Sciences, and Marco Peña Garcia, a Neuroscience PhD student.

Our study leverages the Drosophila whole-brain connectome to trace identify and analyze taste circuits in the fly brain, which have remained a mystery for a long time. We found that neural circuits for processing different tastes remain largely segregated at the second layer, but begin to converge at the third layer. Circuits for different taste modalities have different anatomical and functional properties, including projections to distinct brain regions and varying ratios of excitatory to inhibitory outputs. We identified a lot of cross-talk between taste and two other sensory pathways, olfaction and mechanosensation, which likely reflects the importance of integrating a food’s smell, taste, and texture when deciding what to eat. We also identified specific patterns of lateral and feedback connections - both within and across different taste modalities - which are predicted to shape taste coding in specific ways.

Check out our post from last year for a longer summary of the paper and more pretty pictures!

We want to thank the reviewers whose suggestions helped to improve the paper, as well as the editor who predicted that our study “will be a fundamental paper in the field” - we certainly hope so!