Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 8, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14192
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Funding
- Federation of European Biochemical Societies Long Term Fellowship
- EMBO Long Term Fellowship
- Human Frontier Science Program Long-term Fellowship
- French National Research Agency Program DESIRABLE [ANR-12-ALID-0001]
- University of Lausanne
- European Research Council Starting Independent Researcher and Consolidator Grants [205202, 615094]
- Swiss National Science Foundation Sinergia Grant [CRSII3_136307]
- Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center [NIH P40OD018537]
- Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) [CRSII3_136307] Funding Source: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF)
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) [ANR-12-ALID-0001] Funding Source: Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR)
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Textural properties provide information on the ingestibility, digestibility and state of ripeness or decay of sources of nutrition. Compared with our understanding of the chemosensory assessment of food, little is known about the mechanisms of texture detection. Here we show that Drosophila melanogaster can discriminate food texture, avoiding substrates that are either too hard or too soft. Manipulations of food substrate properties and flies' chemosensory inputs indicate that texture preferences are revealed only in the presence of an appetitive stimulus, but are not because of changes in nutrient accessibility, suggesting that animals discriminate the substrates' mechanical characteristics. We show that texture preference requires NOMPC, a TRP-family mechanosensory channel. NOMPC localizes to the sensory dendrites of neurons housed within gustatory sensilla, and is essential for their mechanosensory-evoked responses. Our results identify a sensory pathway for texture detection and reveal the behavioural integration of chemical and physical qualities of food.
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