Using fruit flies, researchers say they have identified a specific and very small set of brain cells -- dubbed dopamine wedge neurons -- responsible for driving the insects' food preferences toward ...

Those flies ate on average about twice as much sugar per fly compared with those whose food-preference neurons had not been silenced. When the scientists genetically engineered the dopamine wedge ...

When the investigators deprived flies of protein in their diets, those neurons released a chemical signal (dopamine) that appeared to direct the flies craving for their main protein ...