Dr. Diego Bohórquez

And she reached out to me.

And literally she came and as we were chatting, she said like, Diego, I see that you're working between in this interface of the gut and the brain.

And I have this fiber optic that is flexible.

You know, will you have any use for it?

So with that fiber optic, that made a big difference to study interrogate the function of these cells to behavior.

So when we were able to put those opsins, the light sensitive proteins inside of these neuropods, now when we turn the light on to shut off these cells very rapidly,

we found something very interesting.

So normally animals, when you give them the choice between a sweetener, which is devoid of caloric value.

So like aspartame or stevia or something.

Yeah.

And you give them sugar, table sugar, the animal

invariably will go to sugar.

They prefer sugar.

They prefer sugar.

If they have never seen sugar, it will take them a little bit more time, but regularly, by the second day, it's within 90 seconds that they detect what is sugar.

That's correct.

And people have described this phenomenon for a while.

And in fact, in 2007, there was an elegant experiment done by Professor Ivan de Araujo at Duke University.

in which the taste receptors were genetically erased.

And the animals were not capable of distinguishing the sweetener from the water, but they could still distinguish sugar from water, meaning that there was something else that was detecting that sugar.