Biological Mechanisms of Food-Related Decision Making

进食或拒绝食物是分级的多感官决定的结果- 制作过程。与粮食有关的决定必须经常解决冲突，例如是否 吃一种看起来很吸引人，但闻起来腐烂的水果。这样的决定需要神经 评价食品特性的基质.外观、气味、味道、触感和 比较/对比这些特征，以决定是否接近、评估和/或 消费。我们研究了果蝇和果蝇与食物相关的决策 秀丽线虫线虫具有更简单的行为特征，是高度 在实验上易于处理，并已被证明在产生与以下方面相关的生物学见解方面具有实用价值 哺乳动物模型系统和人类。拟议中的果蝇研究提供了 详细了解电路基板、神经调节通路和 果蝇甜/苦/甜食物选择的神经编码及其研究基础 更广泛地说，是在信息相互冲突的情况下进行决策。拟议中的线虫 研究提供了广泛的证据来检测蠕虫的颜色和潜在的 细胞/分子机制，揭示了在进化过程中 古老的不依赖视素的颜色检测系统存在于包括哺乳动物在内的其他动物中。

Consumption or rejection of food are outcomes of a hierarchical multisensory decision- making process. Food-related decisions must frequently resolve conflicts, such as whether to consume a fruit that is visually appealing but smells rotten. Such decisions require neural substrates for evaluating characteristics of food—appearance, smell, taste, touch—and comparing/contrasting such characteristics to decide whether to approach, assess, and/or consume. We study food-related decision making in Drosophila melanogaster flies and Caenorhabditis elegans nematode worms, which have simpler behavioral repertoires, are highly experimentally tractable, and have proven utility at generating biological insights of relevance to mammalian model systems and human beings. The proposed Drosophila studies provide detailed mechanistic understanding of the circuit substrates, neuromodulatory pathways, and neural encoding of sweet/bittersweet food choice in Drosophila, and a foundation for research more broadly into decision making under conflicting information. The proposed C. elegans studies provide extensive evidence of worm color detection and the underlying cellular/molecular mechanisms, revealing pathways that could underlie an evolutionarily ancient opsin-independent color detection system present in other animals including mammals.