The TRP-channel painless mediates substrate stiffness sensing in the legs during Drosophila oviposition
Vijayaditya Ray, Lasse B. Bräcker, Alexandros Kourtidis, Charlie Rosher, Gesa F. Dinges, Anna Pierzchlińska, Ansgar Büschges, Kai Feng, Kevin M. Cury, Nicolas Gompel · 2025
Read The TRP-channel painless mediates substrate stiffness sensing in the legs during Drosophila oviposition by Vijayaditya Ray, Lasse B. Bräcker, Alexandros Kourtidis, Charlie Rosher, Gesa F. Dinges, Anna Pierzchlińska, Ansgar Büschges, Kai Feng, Kevin M. Cury, Nicolas Gompel (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-12768414.txt.
Description
Ten authors study how fruit flies sense stiffness when laying eggs in this 2025 paper. Female flies favor soft patches in ripe fruit, and the team traced that choice to a sensing pathway in the legs, driven by a channel gene called painless.
The sense organs sit mainly at leg joints, where the outer shell bends most as the fly presses on a surface. The channel protein works in the nerve cells of those organs and is needed for the softness choice. Boosting the gene in the same organs partly restored the choice in mutant flies. The work shows how joint sensors can act as indirect stiffness gauges.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Vijayaditya Ray, Lasse B. Bräcker, Alexandros Kourtidis, Charlie Rosher, Gesa F. Dinges, Anna Pierzchlińska, Ansgar Büschges, Kai Feng, Kevin M. Cury, Nicolas Gompel |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 63 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |