When fly larvae are hungry

Does this situation appear familiar to you? You go shopping on an empty stomach and notice at the checkouts that more – and mostly unhealthy – products have found their way into your shopping cart than originally planned. Unconsciously, your brain has told you to still your hunger by buying lots of high-calorie food, such as chocolate and frozen pizzas. In her research group at the University of Konstanz, biologist Dr Katrin Vogt is using fly larvae of the species Drosophila melanogaster to study how the brain controls behaviour depending on hunger and other internal states.

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Read more about how hunger affects information processing in the larval brain and the animals´ behaviour – and what conclusions can we draw from this about the human brain – in the online magazine campus.kn:

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Key facts:

• Dr Katrin Vogt is neurobiologist and leads a junior research group at the University of Konstanz. Previously she completed a postdoc at Harvard University.
• Research focus: How does the brain control behaviour depending on internal states and context?
• Original study: Katrin Vogt, David M. Zimmerman, Matthias Schlichting, Luis Hernandez-Nunez, Shanshan Qin, Karen Malacon, Michael Rosbash, Cengiz Pehlevan, Albert Cardona, Aravinthan D. T. Samuel (2021); Internal state configures olfactory behavior and early sensory processing in Drosophila larvae; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd6900
• The presented study was part of Katrin Vogt’s postdoctoral work at Harvard University and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, Germany) and the National Institute of Health (NIH, USA).