# Biological Mechanisms of Food-Related Decision Making

> **NIH NIH R35** · YALE UNIVERSITY · 2024 · $418,750

## Abstract

Consumption or rejection of food are outcomes of a hierarchical multisensory decision-
making process. Food-related decisions must frequently resolve conflicts, such as whether to
consume a fruit that is visually appealing but smells rotten. Such decisions require neural
substrates for evaluating characteristics of food—appearance, smell, taste, touch—and
comparing/contrasting such characteristics to decide whether to approach, assess, and/or
consume. We study food-related decision making in Drosophila melanogaster flies and
Caenorhabditis elegans nematode worms, which have simpler behavioral repertoires, are highly
experimentally tractable, and have proven utility at generating biological insights of relevance to
mammalian model systems and human beings. The proposed Drosophila studies provide
detailed mechanistic understanding of the circuit substrates, neuromodulatory pathways, and
neural encoding of sweet/bittersweet food choice in Drosophila, and a foundation for research
more broadly into decision making under conflicting information. The proposed C. elegans
studies provide extensive evidence of worm color detection and the underlying
cellular/molecular mechanisms, revealing pathways that could underlie an evolutionarily
ancient opsin-independent color detection system present in other animals including mammals.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10928091
- **Project number:** 5R35GM145251-03
- **Recipient organization:** YALE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Michael Nitabach
- **Activity code:** R35 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $418,750
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2022-09-20 → 2027-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10928091

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10928091, Biological Mechanisms of Food-Related Decision Making (5R35GM145251-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10928091. Licensed CC0.

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