“…These results reproduce the known effects of natural sugar or bitter (Flood et al, 2013;Thoma et al, 2016;Marella et al, 2006;Joseph and Heberlein, 2012;Das et al, 2014;Schwaerzel et al, 2003), providing reassurance that our activation paradigms are relevant to natural behavior. Our results also align with other studies that reported effects on locomotion or innate preference using optogenetic taste neuron activation (Aso et al, 2014;Tadres and Louis, 2020;Mohammad et al, 2017;Haberkern et al, 2019;DeAngelis et al, 2020;Stern and Yang, 2017).…”