Diverse Food-Sensing Neurons Trigger Idiothetic Local Search in Drosophila.

ABSTRACT: Foraging animals may benefit from remembering the location of a newly discovered food patch while continuing to explore nearby [1, 2]. For example, after encountering a drop of yeast or sugar, hungry flies often perform a local search [3, 4]. That is, rather than remaining on the food or simply walking away, flies execute a series of exploratory excursions during which they repeatedly depart and return to the resource. Fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, can perform this food-centered search behavior in the absence of external landmarks, instead relying on internal (idiothetic) cues [5]. This path-integration behavior may represent a deeply conserved navigational capacity in insects [6, 7], but its underlying neural basis remains unknown. Here, we used optogenetic activation to screen ca

SUBMITTER: Corfas RA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6532790 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature