MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Hey, A?
A MART脥NEZ, HOST:
Yep.
MARTIN: Ever bite into a yummy-looking apple only to be rewarded with a chunk of nasty, mealy pulp?
MART脥NEZ: Oh, my God. If I expect crisp and instead get squish, it's a bad, bad deal (laughter).
MARTIN: It is a bad day.
MART脥NEZ: Bad deal.
MARTIN: OK. Well, it turns out other creatures associate the texture of food with how tasty it is, too, like fruit fly larva - aka maggots. Here's science reporter Ari Daniel.
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: The persimmon was Nikita Komarov's favorite fruit when he was growing up in Moscow.
NIKITA KOMAROV: When they are properly ripe, they're delicious and sweet and soft.
DANIEL: Just before that, though, they're tart and bitter. He learned to tell from the first bite whether it'd be bliss or blah, based on the texture of the fruit - even before he tasted anything. Komarov, who's a neurobiology, Ph.D. student at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland, says this sense of mouth feel...
KOMAROV: Is it crunchy? Is it soft? Is it chewy? Is it gooey?
DANIEL: ...Is important information about food safety and quality, helping avoid eating something that might be dangerous. But actually, very little is known about how animals perceive food texture. So Komarov and his colleagues turned to study the phenomenon in fruit flies - specifically, the larva.
KOMAROV: It eats constantly, so it really, really, really cares about food.
DANIEL: Komarov engineered larvae without their taste organ, while leaving everything else about them untouched.
KOMAROV: We gave the animals a choice between a harder and a softer substrate.
DANIEL: Normal larvae prefer to eat the softer substrate, but the larvae without a taste organ ate both.
KOMAROV: They suddenly stopped caring.
DANIEL: So Komarov suspected an intact taste organ also allows a larva to detect that delicious, not-too-hard, not-too-soft rotting fruit texture - kind of like human tongues.
KOMAROV: In the maggot, what was thought to be an exclusively taste organ is actually also a texture organ.
DANIEL: Texture, it turns out, is as important a signal to the maggot as how bitter or toxic a food is. Komarov then examined one of the neurons within the taste organ. He found it responds to sugar, acid, salt and texture.
KOMAROV: Seems to be a neuron that sort of does a little bit of everything.
DANIEL: That is, not all neurons respond to just one thing and relay it up to the brain. It's way more complex. Komarov says the work may one day provide insights into eating disorders among people and, on the flip side, how to tweak the texture of foods, healthy or otherwise, to make them more palatable. The research is published in PLOS Biology.
For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel.
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