Clock-gated morning rush hour of glucose utilization depicted as highway traffic. In the morning (left), clock-controlled food intake at dawn results in high glucose concentration in Drosophila body tissues, analogous to higher number of vehicles on the highway. This increased “traffic flow”, defined by the total number of vehicles passing a given point in a given time, is aided by the opening of the “7AM-11AM only” lanes that are gated by the circadian clock. This is analogous to higher metabolic flux in the morning hours in fly tissues. In other times of the daily cycle (right), both glucose concentration (number of cars) and pathway flux (traffic flow) are low. Vehicle icons were generated by authors using Google’s Nano Banana 2 from the prompts such as “create a top-view of a car icon in white background”, February 16, 2026.

The #circadian clock & cellular #metabolism are tightly coupled. Yao Cai & @joanna-chiu.bsky.social explore a @plosbiology.org study showing how #glucose metabolism changes during the day in #Drosophila and how it is disrupted in clock & sleep mutants 🧪 Paper: plos.io/3Olm1M1 Primer: plos.io/4sUov2g

Preconception exposures of female mice to a panel of metabolic disruptors induce sexually dimorphic metabolic perturbations in their offspring
#Drosophila

Can a single brain cell decide whether to eat or not? 🧠🪰

Turns out... yes. And we found it in the fruit fly.
A pair of neurons called SELKs (subesophageal leucokinin neurons) can drive feeding behavior in both directions. They promote it or suppress it. Here's how: 🧵

Congratulations Meet!!

I need to work harder, I don't even control my office thermostat....😂

Thank you so much - excellent work by our teams made this collaboration really fun!

Thanks Parthive!!

Thank you!

Thank you Shefali!

😂

Congratulations Maria - amazing news 🎉

Congratulations to you and your team on the paper 🎉

Looking forward to reading this!!

Thank you Julia!! Hope you are well 😊

Thank you Maria!!! Hope you enjoy 😊

Thanks Tony!! There sure is a lot to build on in there, and in the end the fantastic effort by our teams made the paper stronger 😅

Thanks Stephen - and congratulations right back at you on the back-to-back papers!!!

Thanks Mike, I really appreciate your support. Saw version 2 of your SREBP preprint yesterday, amazing work!

Also grateful for the privilege to do this work on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people at UBC, and for institutional support from @ubccps.bsky.social @ubcmedicine.bsky.social and @crchum.bsky.social @umontreal-en.bsky.social /end

Very grateful to everyone who gave their time to provide feedback on the project over the years. And a huge THANK YOU to all the wonderful public resources we exploited to complete this project: Fly Cell Atlas, @bdsc.bsky.social @flybase.bsky.social @vdrc-flies.bsky.social /10

Overall, this was a super fun collaboration that answered some questions and opened up many future research directions - we are excited to keep learning more! /9

What was remarkable, at least to me, was that across both species the effects of neuronal ATGL loss on energy homeostasis were specific to males. This raises a lot of intriguing questions about sex differences in neuronal lipid metabolism. /8

Mechanistically, we show ATGL function supplies fatty acids and phospholipids in these hunger-activated neurons to sustain mitochondrial and endoplasmic reticulum homeostasis. /7

In particular, we showed that the neuroanatomical focus of ATGL's effects on energy homeostasis lies in hunger-activated neurons. In flies these are the Adipokinetic hormone-producing cells and in mice they are the AgRP neurons. /6

Across flies, worms, and mice we showed that neuronal ATGL loss impairs parameters of energy homeostasis (e.g., fat metabolism in flies and worms, food intake and energy expenditure in mice). This identifies a highly conserved role for neuronal ATGL in regulating nLD and physiology. /5

To answer these questions, we identified a gene network regulating nLD in vivo including ATGL. Follow-up studies targeted ATGL as it catalyzes the first step of triglyceride breakdown, and we showed neuronal loss of Drosophila ATGL impairs fat metabolism (PMID 31961851). /4

In brief, we show that in both flies and mice neuronal lipid droplets (nLD) are present in vivo under normal physiological conditions. This raised interesting questions about how nLD support neuron function and influence physiology. /3

We are incredibly grateful to a suite of collaborators without whom this paper wouldn't have been possible: Drs. Stephanie Fulton, Tao Huan, Matthieu Ruiz, Baptiste Lacoste, Ciaran Murphy-Royal, Martine Tetrault, Marie-Eve Tremblay, J. Alex Parker. /2

Neuronal lipid droplets play a conserved and sex-biased role in maintaining whole-body energy homeostasis - Nature Metabolism In vivo regulation of neuronal lipid droplet formation mediates whole-body energy homeostasis in a sex-specific manner in Drosophila and mice.

Beyond delighted to share our amazing collaboration with Thierry Alquier's lab @alquierthierry.bsky.social on a conserved role for neuronal lipid droplets in regulating energy homeostasis in vivo led by Celena Cherian, Romane Manceau, Danie Majeur, and Colin Miller www.nature.com/articles/s42... /1

Screenshot of the FlyCyc page at https://biocyc.org.

We have recently updated FlyCyc biocyc.org/DMEL/organis..., the pathway-genome database representing Drosophila metabolism, to include enzymatic complexes as well as further improvements to enzyme annotations. #FlyCyc is now classed as a ‘Tier 1 Highly Curated Organism Database’.