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New research finds an area of the drosophila brain that can trick hungry flies into acting full.
New research finds an area of the drosophila brain that can trick hungry flies into acting full.
Two decades ago, the discovery of neuropeptide Y (NPY), a peptide in the mammalian brain involved in food-seeking behavior, sparked a search for a weight-loss remedy that could interfere with its activity. Eventually the promise of other drug targets, along with the possible side effects of targeting NPY, put a damper on the effort - until now. New findings about the action of this appetite-promoting peptide could bring NPY back to the front burner.
A study released this week in Cell reports on fruit fly neural circuitry that is affected by the drosophila equivalent of NPY - dNPF. The latter peptide disrupts a group of neurons that would normally put the brakes on tapping memory to search for food. Instead, dNPF allows neurons to release signals that prompt flies to hunt for a meal. By blocking the effect that dNPF has on neurons that interact with drosophila's memory center, the researchers found they could halt the flies' feeding frenzy, and trick them into thinking they were full, even though they had not eaten. The fact that NPY in mammals has similar appetite-inducing activity as its drosophila analogue suggests that it might also govern an as-yet unknown network in the human brain that regulates our desire to seek sustenance.
"We know quite a lot about the memory system for olfactory memory in the fruit flies. That gave us some hope that we would be able to find a site of integration between [hunger] state and...memory," says Scott Waddell, an associate professor of neurobiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, and supervisor of the new research.
