
==== Front
bioRxiv
BIORXIV
bioRxiv
2692-8205
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

10.1101/2024.09.14.613080
preprint
1
Article
Connectomic analysis of taste circuits in Drosophila
Walker Sydney R.
Peña-Garcia Marco
Devineni Anita V. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9540-8655

15 9 2024
2024.09.14.613080https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use.
http://biorxiv.org/lookup/doi/10.1101/2024.09.14.613080
nihpp-2024.09.14.613080.pdf
SUMMARY

Our sense of taste is critical for regulating food consumption. The fruit fly Drosophila represents a highly tractable model to investigate mechanisms of taste processing, but taste circuits beyond sensory neurons are largely unidentified. Here, we use a whole-brain connectome to investigate the organization of Drosophila taste circuits. We trace pathways from four populations of sensory neurons that detect different taste modalities and project to the subesophageal zone (SEZ). We find that second-order taste neurons are primarily located within the SEZ and largely segregated by taste modality, whereas third-order neurons have more projections outside the SEZ and more overlap between modalities. Taste projections out of the SEZ innervate regions implicated in feeding, olfactory processing, and learning. We characterize interconnections between taste pathways, identify modality-dependent differences in taste neuron properties, and use computational simulations to relate connectivity to predicted activity. These studies provide insight into the architecture of Drosophila taste circuits.
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