Appropriate regulation of feeding behaviours is essential for the survival of animals. Satiety cues a feeding animal to cease further ingestion of food; thus, it can protect animals from excessive intake. Defects in regulating satiety results in persistent food searching to satisfy thesea sustaineding drives, and leads to consequences symptoms that are implicitly dangerous to public health, e.g., including obesity and hypersexuality. Therefore, a detailed understanding of how neurons control satiety is a high-priority in many health and social fields.
The proposed project focuses on discovering the fundamental principles that underlie how the neurons control satiety. Satiety mechanisms are central to all metazoans, and strong evidence has shown that the mechanisms are extremely well conserved even from flies to humans. Therefore, we can take advantage of the fruit fly to identify the core neural networks for model the satietyety program to solve this problem. The flyis model has tremendous advantages; we can leverage its fast and powerful genetic tools to delineate a high-resolution picture of circuit principles underlying satiety control (Fig. 1).
We have three aims:
1) We will establish feeding assay platform for large scale genetic screening of satiety control (Fig. 2). We have created strong engineering team composed of professors and students from different academic backgrounds.
2) We will identify the neural substrates for satiety control of feeding.
3) We will uncover the circuit principles of sensory-specific satiety.
This study will reveal principles underlying the generic satiety control, from the molecular to circuit levels, with two fundamental conserved drives, sex and food. Uncovering these mechanisms will provide the foundation (a starting point) that is absolutely required to develop novel approaches to difficult societal issues arising from a lack of satiety, such as hypersexuality and obesity.
