The blueprint for taste: Scientists map the neural circuitry behind feeding decisions in fruit flies

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Add as preferred source Neurons transforming taste information into movements. Credit: Inês de Haan Vicente Everything you eat passes one checkpoint before it enters your body: taste. In a fraction of a second, it decides what gets swallowed and what gets rejected, a judgment call critical to survival. Now, for the first time, researchers at the Champalimaud Foundation (CF) and their collaborators have mapped the complete neural wiring behind this process in an animal, tracing taste signals from sensory neurons across the body all the way to the motor neurons that drive feeding and revealing neural pathways that could explain how taste triggers anticipatory insulin release before a single calorie is absorbed.