Motor control of fly feeding

What is it about?

This paper is a review about how feeding behavior is controlled by the fly brain. In response to an appealing taste, flies, like humans, use muscles to ingest food and swallow it. Taste sensory neurons communicate with neurons in the brain to process the taste information and send commands to the motor neurons that control the muscles. This review covers the neurons that have been discovered in the fly brain that participate in this behavior.

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Why is it important?

To understand how the brain works, it is important to discover what neurons in the brain are involved in controlling behaviors, and how those circuits are designed. Flies provide a model system with few enough neurons that eventually all the neurons involved in a behavior can be discovered. This has relevance to understanding not only feeding, but also more generally how brains are designed to control behavior.