However, exposure to this bitter tastant had no impact on the fluorescence (Figure 8I). We did not detect signals when we expressed OBP49a-t-YFP(2) with YFP(1):GR64f (Figure 8J). The combination click here of YFP(1):GR64a with SNMP1-YFP(2) also did not produce fluorescence (Figure 8K). These findings support the conclusion that OBP49a either interacts with or is adjacent to GR64a. Many bitter-tasting chemicals are toxic (Glendinning, 2007). Therefore, the ability of animals to suppress their attraction to sugars and

other nutritious foods that are laced with bitter tastants is critical for survival. Consequently, this avoidance behavior is conserved throughout the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, the molecules and molecular mechanisms through which positive feeding behavior is inhibited by deterrent compounds are poorly unexplored in most animals, such as the fruit fly. Potentially, there are multiple neural mechanisms that could explain how aversive tastants suppress the otherwise stimulatory effects of sweeteners and other attractive compounds. Animals ranging from flies to humans have separate taste receptor cells devoted to

Vorinostat sensing bitter and sweet tastants, and the suppression of sweet by bitter compounds could take place through integration of separate inputs in the brain. There could also be lateral interactions in the periphery between separate sweet- and bitter-responsive afferent receptor cells. Alternatively, a bitter compound might directly suppress sweet-activated taste receptor cells. In this study, we

unexpectedly identified a mechanism through which an array of bitter compounds inhibited the stimulatory effects of sucrose in flies. This work emerged from a functional analysis of OBPs in Drosophila taste, and was motivated by the finding that multiple Obp genes were highly enriched in taste sensilla ( McKenna et al., 1994, Pikielny et al., 1994, Ozaki et al., 1995, Galindo and Smith, 2001, Shanbhag et al., 2001, Koganezawa and Shimada, 2002, Sánchez-Gracia et al., 2009 and Yasukawa et al., 2010), but their roles in the gustatory system were largely unexplored. We found that OBP49a was required for avoiding bitter-tasting compounds in a standard two-way choice assay consisting of 1 mM sucrose alone versus 5 mM sucrose plus bitter tastants. Because Cytidine deaminase wild-type flies find bitter tastants aversive, they prefer the lower concentration of sucrose, when the higher concentration of sucrose is laced with tastants such as berberine, quinine, or denatonium. However, the Obp49a mutant animals were impaired in this avoidance behavior. The phenotype was similar to that resulting from elimination of GRs, such as GR33a and GR66a, which are broadly expressed in avoidance GRNs, and are necessary in these GRNs for induction of bitter-induced action potentials ( Moon et al., 2006, Moon et al., 2009 and Lee et al., 2009).