The role of the sugar receptor IR60b for Drosophila melanogaster: A hypothesis
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Neuroscience
- Keywords
- Taste, Sugar receptor, Drosophila
- Copyright
- © 2018 Szyszka et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. The role of the sugar receptor IR60b for Drosophila melanogaster: A hypothesis. PeerJ Preprints 6:e3511v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3511v1
Abstract
In a recent paper, Joseph and colleagues (Joseph et al., 2017) have characterized the selective sucrose receptor IR60b in Drosophila, and proposed that it serves to limit sucrose consumption, and thus to prevent overfeeding. Here, we propose an alternative hypothesis for this sucrose receptor. Adult fruit flies feed by excreting saliva onto the food, and imbibing
the predigested liquefied food, or by filling the crop, where the food is predigested. Enzymes in the saliva hydrolyse starch and disacharides into absorbable monosacharides. Premature ingestion into the midgut would not give the enzymes in the saliva enough time to predigest the food. Thus, IR60b might be used as a sensor to monitor the digestive state of external food or crop content: when disaccharides (sucrose) concentration is high, ingestion is inhibited, preventing the malabsorption of sucrose in the gut.
Author Comment
This article is a comment on "A receptor and neuron that activate a circuit limiting sucrose consumption" by Joseph and colleagues (Joseph et al., 2017).