eLife paper published

Our paper on bitter taste processing was published in eLife today! It’s titled “Selective integration of diverse taste inputs within a single taste modality” and addresses how the brain processes and integrates different types of bitter taste inputs.

If you’re not ready to read the whole thing, check out this summary that we wrote back when the preprint was first posted. But since then we added a bunch of new data, from new behavioral experiments to connectomic analyses of taste pathways in the higher brain (shown in the picture).

We also removed a bunch of data from the original preprint, including everything about the sugar pathway and hunger-dependent modulation. We hope to incorporate this into a future paper, but in the meantime, don’t throw out the first preprint!

All credit for the new results goes to 4 amazing Emory students. Arvin Sarkissian, a rotation student from the Neuroscience PhD program, singlehandedly performed the connectomic analyses in Figure 9 (with credit to Barbara Noro for some of the original code). Maia Yang, a third-year undergraduate Biology major, performed nearly all of the optoPAD feeding assays in Figure 2. Lam Nguyen and Kaushiki Ravi, second-year undergraduates, conducted behavioral experiments testing locomotion, spatial preference, and learning.

And of course, the original work was conducted by Dr. Devineni and some fantastic mentees at Columbia: former technician Julia Deere (now a PhD student at Rockefeller), former technician Hannah Uttley, and former City College of New York undergraduate Nicole Martinez Santana (now a nursing student at Columbia).

Congrats to all the authors!

If you’re interested in exploring other questions related to taste processing, learn more about joining the lab here!