The present experiment examined the neuronal networks involved in the latent inhibition of conditioned disgust by measuring brain oxidative metabolism. Rats were given nonreinforced intraoral (IO) exposure to saccharin (exposed groups) or water (non-exposed groups) followed by a conditioning trial in which the animals received an infusion of saccharin paired (or unpaired) with LiCl. On testing,...

The sense of taste is a key component of the sensory machinery, enabling the evaluation of both the safety as well as forming associations regarding the nutritional value of ingestible substances. Indicative of the salience of the modality, taste conditioning can be achieved in rodents upon a single pairing of a tastant with a chemical stimulus inducing malaise. This robust associative learning...

To qualify as a "basic" taste quality or modality, defined as a group of chemicals that taste alike, three empirical benchmarks have commonly been used. The first is that a candidate group of tastants must have a dedicated transduction mechanism in the peripheral nervous system. The second is that the tastants evoke physiological responses in dedicated afferent taste nerves innervating the orop...

Taste perception plays an important role in regulating food preference, eating behavior and energy homeostasis. Taste perception is modulated by a variety of factors, including gastric hormones such as ghrelin. Ghrelin can regulate growth hormone release, food intake, adiposity, and energy metabolism. Octanoylation of ghrelin by ghrelin O-acyltransferase (GOAT) is a specific post-translational ...

The sense of taste is critical in determining the nutritional suitability of foods. Sweet and bitter are primary taste modalities in mammals, and their behavioral relevance is similar in flies. Sweet taste drives the appetitive response to energy sources, whereas bitter taste drives avoidance of potential toxins and also suppresses the sweet response [1, 2]. Despite their importance to survival...

BACKGROUND Smoking is the cause of inducing changes in taste functionality under conditions of chronic exposure. The objective of this study was to evaluate taste sensitivity in young smokers and non-smokers and identify any differences in the shape, density and vascularisation of the fungiform papillae (fPap) of their tongue. METHODS Sixty-two male subjects who served in the Greek military f...