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When someone gets food poisoning, it might be a while before they want to eat the thing that made them sick again, and the same is true for fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster). In a study published today (July 21) in Nature, researchers determined that after a bacterial infection in the gut, glial cells and neurons in the fly brain communicate in a way that tamps down olfaction and protects the animals from eating the pathogen again.
These authors “unraveled a mechanism that on the genetic, neuronal, and organismic level connects bacteria in the gut all the way to behavior,” says Ilona Grunwald Kadow, a neuroscientist at the Technical University of Munich who did not participate in the study. “It may be one of the fundamental ways that good or bad microorganisms in our gut impact our brains.”
Genentech’s Heinrich Jasper knew from previous work that aging ...
