ArticleBiology letters2014
Fruit flies learn to avoid odours associated with virulent infection.
Article in Biology letters, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Standard ingredient ofMicrobiology spectrum · 2025Article
- Learned behavioral avoidance can alter outbreak dynamics in a model for waterborne infectious diseases.Journal of mathematical biology · 2025Article
- Genetic Variation in Trophic Avoidance Behaviour Shows Fruit Flies are Generally Attracted to Bacterial Substrates.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- An integrative sensor of body states: how the mushroom body modulates behavior depending on physiological context.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2024Review
- Article
- Review
- Evolution and Ecology of Parasite Avoidance.Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics · 2022Article
- Conditioned taste aversion in the cricket Gryllus bimaculatus.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Integrating concepts of physiological and behavioral resistance to parasites.Frontiers in ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Article
- Sexual selection reveals a cost of pathogen resistance undetected in life-history assays.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2020Article
- Sexual selection favours good or bad genes for pathogen resistance depending on males' pathogen exposure.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Parasite avoidance behaviours in aquatic environments.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Internal State Dependent Odor Processing and Perception-The Role of Neuromodulation in the Fly Olfactory System.Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2018Review
- Molecular characterization of tsetse's proboscis and its response to Trypanosoma congolense infection.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2017Article
- Article
- Article
- Learned parasite avoidance is driven by host personality and resistance to infection in a fish-trematode interaction.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Remembering Components of Food in Drosophila.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2016Review
- Quantitative genetics of learning ability and resistance to stress in Drosophila melanogaster.Ecology and evolution · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
While learning to avoid toxic food is common in mammals and occurs in some insects, learning to avoid cues associated with infectious pathogens has received little attention. We demonstrate that Drosophila melanogaster show olfactory learning in response to infection with their virulent intestinal pathogen Pseudomonas entomophila. This pathogen was not aversive to taste when added to food. Nonetheless, flies exposed for 3 h to food laced with P. entomophila, and scented with an odorant, became subsequently less likely to choose this odorant than flies exposed to pathogen-laced food scented with another odorant. No such effect occurred after an otherwise identical treatment with an avirulent mutant of P. entomophila, indicating that the response is mediated by pathogen virulence. These results demonstrate that a virulent pathogen infection can act as an aversive unconditioned stimulus which flies can associate with food odours, and thus become less attracted to pathogen-contaminated food.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.