Department of Biology, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA.
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Cold Spring Harb Protoc. 2023 Jun 1;2023(6):pdb.prot108093. doi: 10.1101/pdb.prot108093.
The ability to modify behavior as a result of previous experience allows an organism to adapt to changes in its environment. Even innate behaviors, like feeding initiation, can change if previously associated with a noxious stimulus. Here, we describe a taste memory assay pairing appetitive and bitter tastants, resulting in aversive taste conditioning. By training a fly to associate sweet sucrose applied to the tarsus with bitter quinine applied to the proboscis, flies quickly learn to suppress the reflexive proboscis extension to sucrose, providing a bioassay for behavioral and molecular plasticity. This single-fly taste memory assay may be applied to adult of any genetic background and allows for interrogation of the neural circuitry and molecular processes encoding memories while simultaneously measuring behavior. Unlike many other memory assays, this system requires few custom components, and therefore can be easily established in laboratories with minimal expertise in the study of fly behavior.
由于先前的经验而改变行为的能力使生物体能够适应其环境的变化。即使是先天的行为，如进食启动，如果以前与有害刺激相关联，也可以改变。在这里，我们描述了一种味觉记忆测定法，将有吸引力的和苦味的味觉物质配对，从而产生厌恶味觉条件作用。通过训练苍蝇将跗节上的甜味蔗糖与喙上的苦味奎宁联系起来，苍蝇很快学会抑制对蔗糖的反射性喙伸展，从而提供了一种用于行为和分子可塑性的生物测定法。这种单只苍蝇的味觉记忆测定法可以应用于任何遗传背景的成年苍蝇，并允许在同时测量行为的情况下，对编码记忆的神经回路和分子过程进行探究。与许多其他记忆测定法不同，该系统需要的定制组件很少，因此可以在对苍蝇行为研究经验很少的实验室中轻松建立。
