# Modulation of aging by Sensory Perception

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR · 2024 · $455,571

## Abstract

Project Summary
Scientists and laypeople have long been fascinated by the senses. Aristotle distinguished four of them, each
linked with one of the four elements – vision with water, sound with air, smell with fire, and touch with earth.
Since that time, we have become aware of many more, including those involving position or pain. Now,
research across a range of disciplines has revealed that sensory perception can modulate many aspects of
physiology and health. Indeed, this project has funded studies in our laboratory that have illuminated basic
and translational principles of how sensory perception influences energy homeostasis, tissue physiology, and
organism aging. Work from our lab has established that exposure of flies to food-based odorants limits the
beneficial effects of dietary restriction, that loss of sensory neurons affects fly lifespan, and that perceptional
experiences of food, sex, and danger modulate lifespan through neural circuits that utilize evolutionarily
conserved neuropeptides. Ongoing work will continue to define a mechanistic framework for sensory
modulation of aging by revealing neural circuits and signaling pathways that emanate from sensory tissues
and that interface with the deeper regions of the central nervous system to orchestrate biological changes in
peripheral tissues. In this renewal, we will interrogate the roles of the biogenic amines serotonin, dopamine,
and octopamine, which regulate persistent neural activity in many systems, in modulating the long-term
effects of sensory perception on health and aging. We will also employ an array of new technologies and
behavioral assays to develop inference on the relationships among these signaling molecules, the associated
neural circuits that modulate lifespan, and the neural states they induce. Additional work will establish
similarities and differences in the ways that sensory inputs impact the activity of a core group of aging-
regulatory neurons in the central complex of the fly brain and will determine how relevant neuromodulators
influence these relationships. Discoveries from our laboratory and others have resulted in a detailed functional
map of the fly brain, and several of the sensory effects on healthy aging described above, and the mechanisms
that underlie them, have since been shown to be conserved in other organisms, including nematodes and mice,
suggesting that a deeper understanding of the mechanisms through which the brain controls fly aging may
lead to novel targets of intervention in humans.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10976500
- **Project number:** 2R01AG030593-16
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR
- **Principal Investigator:** SCOTT PLETCHER
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $455,571
- **Award type:** 2
- **Project period:** 2007-06-01 → 2029-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10976500

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10976500, Modulation of aging by Sensory Perception (2R01AG030593-16). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-06-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10976500. Licensed CC0.

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