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Updated: May 8, 2026

A Novel Behavioral Assay to Investigate Gustatory Responses of Individual, Freely-moving Bumble Bees (Bombus terrestris)
Published on: July 21, 2016
A spoonful of bitter helps the sugar response go down
Svetlana Lvovskaya1, Dean P Smith
1Departments of Pharmacology and Neuroscience, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, 5323 Harry Hines Boulevard, Dallas, TX 75390-9111, USA.
Abstract:
Sweet and bitter taste distinguishes good food sources from potential toxins, but what happens when these tastants are mixed? In this issue of Neuron, Jeong et al. (2013) show that in Drosophila, bitter compounds act through an extracellular odorant-binding protein to inhibit sweet-responsive neurons and block the response to sweet taste.
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