Fruit fly larvae can perceive the squishy texture of decaying flesh

January 29, 2025 | 08:00pm

Biologists pinpoint neurons that sense how food tastes and feels — in maggots

Fruit fly larvae can perceive the squishy texture of decaying flesh

Fruit fly larvae can sense the texture of rotting fruit.Credit: Scott Bauer/USDA/Science Photo Library

For maggots, the experience of eating a succulent meal isn’t just about how their food tastes, but also how it feels. Researchers used genetic tools to reveal that certain neurons in the brain control food choice and can sense both taste and texture¹ .

The conventional view of taste sensing holds that specific neurons carry single signals to the brain, says study co-author Simon Sprecher, a neurobiologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. For instance, sweet taste neurons carry sweet signals and bitter taste neurons carry bitter signals.

But those assumptions have been challenged over the past two decades by studies in fruit flies and mice that suggest neurons might have the capacity to respond to both chemical signals, such as bitter or sweet, as well as mechanical signals, such as texture.

Just right

In the current study, published in PLoS Biology on 30 January, Sprecher and his colleagues set out to see whether individual neurons in taste organs have this ‘multimodal’ capacity. They fed fruit-fly larvae — maggots — different preparations of agarose, a sugary gel. The maggots showed a propensity for a ‘Goldilocks’ preparation, one that was neither too hard nor too soft. The preferred hardness for larvae is “similar to [that] of decaying fruit”, says Sprecher.