In non-viral apocalypse news, our new paper is published today in @CellReports

Using fruit flies, we describe how previous diet can change future food taste

Turns out the taste neuron uses learning and longevity pathways to enhance taste

https://bit.ly/2RoygGT 

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Previously we noticed that consuming the artificial sweetener sucralose altered future sweet taste intensity, but we didn’t know much about how this works.
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We found changing sugar amount, reducing food sweetness, lowering protein concentration, or skipping sugar and only consuming complex carbohydrates all altered how flies then perceived the sugar sucrose.
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Anyway, to see what was happening, we put flies on sweet diet vs. unsweetened diet and then identified all the protein changes in the fly “tongue” by mass spec.
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We found the learning and memory pathway (dopamine receptor/cAMP/PKA/CReB) was required within the fly’s taste neuron to enhance future sweet taste after consuming unsweetened food.
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We also found the pro-longevity factor PGC1-alpha was required to enhance sweet taste, and either a lifespan extending diet or forced expression of PGC1-alpha in taste neurons was sufficient to sensitize sweet taste.
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Weirdly this effect was specific for sucrose and glucose, but not fructose, and we never really figured out that part. Also we didn’t figure out how complex carbs change taste, its a different pathway though.
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So that’s cool, but what’s the point? Not totally sure, but we think it’s a metabolic/sensory feedback that alters how foods taste based on experience and internal cues, and this helps animals consume the calories they need when food tastes different.
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If this system starts to not work right, this could contribute to obesity or anorexia. Our study lines up nicely with awesome work by @Hardkandy000 published last year that explains how high sugar diet changes taste https://bit.ly/2XjHWGs 
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One weird thing: classic studies show taste perception is transduced through cAMP pathway, but in our study, baseline taste was basically normal, and only experience driven changes were different. So maybe taste transduction is different in flies? Or there is redundancy? Dunu
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