ABSTRACT
Introduction............................................................................................................ 307 21.1 The Fruit Fly D. melanogaster as a Model Organism................................ 308 21.2 Polygenic and Single-Gene Analysis .......................................................... 308
21.2.1 Polygenic Analysis ........................................................................... 309 21.2.2 Single-Gene Analysis ....................................................................... 309 21.2.3 Polygenic vs. Single-Gene Analysis of Behavior ............................ 310
21.3 Food Search Behavior.................................................................................. 311 21.4 Role of the Foraging Gene in Other Organisms......................................... 312 Acknowledgments.................................................................................................. 314 References.............................................................................................................. 314
Food search behavior is a complex trait influenced by many internal and external factors. It can involve sensory modalities such as smell, taste, and vision; motor functions such as locomotion; internal environmental cues such as the degree of starvation or satiation; and external environmental cues such as the quality, quantity, and distribution of the food supply. All of this information is likely integrated in the brain and an output (e.g., feed or search more) is then generated. In the Sokolowski laboratory, we use the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as our model organism to genetically dissect the components of food search behavior. In particular, we are interested in understanding the biological basis for naturally occurring variation in larval and adult food search behaviors as well as the biochemical pathways that contribute to these variations. In this chapter, we discuss the fruit fly D. melanogaster as a model organism for behavior-genetic analysis. We compare and contrast the polygenic analysis of naturally occurring behavioral variation
and the single-gene mutant analysis approaches and discuss food search behavior in the larval and adult fruit fly D. melanogaster. We conclude by discussing how this research can be extended to additional organisms.
