Meeting specific nutritional targets from available food, avoiding harmful food and exhibiting proper feeding behaviours are necessary for an animal to survive and thrive. However it is not entirely clear how individual food components like carbohydrates, proteins, water, salt, lipids, foodborne toxins or pathogens, are encoded and remembered selectively when required. Malfunction of neural circuits that encode food and motivational states like hunger could result in eating disorders and systemic physiological changes leading ultimately to conditions like diabetes, hypertension and obesity. I use behavioural assays and precise genetic manipulation of neurons in D​rosophila​to specify neural circuits that represent discrete food components and deprivation state­d​ependent motivational inputs.

My work suggests that memories of individual components of complex food interact to guide behaviour. I will describe how flies independently remember discrete food components by engaging distinct dopaminergic neurons. I will also talk about my ongoing work on how internal states can alter which neurons are recruited for learning the same nutrient information. Finally, food information comes from the gut. I will discuss how a novel toxic food emesis assay will enable me to study the neural connections between the gut and the brain.