Virtual Reality Takes A Leap Into Taste
The fly hasn’t eaten for an entire day and it’s starving. Finally, it finds a pile of edible gelatinous goo. It begins eating when suddenly a green light appears, and the food, which was far from delicious a moment ago, becomes irresistibly sweet. The fly, excited by the sudden improvement, eats with increased vigor. But its enthusiasm quickly wanes when the green light disappears and the flavour of the food reverts to its original blandness.
“The fly’s experience was very real. It was a virtual taste created by directly manipulating its taste neurons”, says Carlos Ribeiro, head of the behavior and Metabolism lab at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal. Together with his team, Ribeiro developed the optoPAD: a system that creates “virtual taste realities”, in a way that can be flexibly paired with the fly’s behavior. They describe this new technology in a scientific article published today June 21st in the journal eLife.
Creating virtual taste realities
The optoPAD combines two high-tech elements: the first is optogenetics, a powerful method that uses light to control the activity of neurons (quite literally to turn them “on” or “off”).
The second element of the optoPAD is an additional system, previously developed in the lab, called flyPAD. “The flyPAD uses touchscreen-type technology to monitor the fly’s feeding behavior. Just like your phone is able to detect the touch of your finger on the screen, flyPAD is able to detect whenever the fly touches the food”, explains José-Maria Moreira, one of the leading co-authors of study.
By combining flyPAD with optogenetics, the researchers were able to overcome one of the main challenges in the field of feeding research: precisely controlling taste sensations.
Taste and beyond
In this study, which shows that the optoPAD is able to effectively pair active feeding with optogenetic manipulations, the researchers demonstrate that these virtual tastes have a very real effect on the behavior of the flies.
The team is now gearing up to start a series of new experiments, and they are already freely sharing this exciting new technology with the scientific community by making all the blueprints and software freely available here: http://ribeirolab.
See the full story here: https://bioengineer.org/virtual-reality-takes-a-leap-into-taste/