regulates gustatory habituation in sweet taste neurons and mediates sugar ingestion in .

Similar to other animals, the fly, reduces its responsiveness to tastants with repeated exposure, a phenomenon called gustatory habituation. Previous studies have focused on the circuit basis of gustatory habituation in the fly chemosensory system. However, gustatory neurons reduce their firing rate during repeated stimulation, suggesting that cell-autonomous mechanisms also contribute to habituation. Here, we used deep learning-based pose estimation and optogenetic stimulation to demonstrate that continuous activation of sweet taste neurons causes gustatory habituation in flies. We conducted a transgenic RNAi screen to identify genes involved in this process and found that knocking down ( in the sweet taste neurons significantly reduced gustatory habituation. Anatomical analysis showed that is expressed in the sweet taste neurons of various chemosensory organs. Using single sensilla electrophysiology, we showed that sweet taste neurons reduced their firing rate with prolonged exposure to sucrose. Knocking down in sweet taste neurons suppressed gustatory habituation by reducing the spike frequency adaptation observed in these neurons during high-concentration sucrose stimulation. Finally, we showed that flies lacking in sweet taste neurons increased their consumption of high-concentration sucrose solution at their first meal bout compared to control flies. Together, our results demonstrate that HisCl1 tunes spike frequency adaptation in sweet taste neurons and contributes to gustatory habituation and food intake regulation in flies. Since HisCl1 is highly conserved across many dipteran and hymenopteran species, our findings open a new direction in studying insect gustatory habituation.