The taste of 30 compounds was studied in the golden hamster with three different methods: single-fiber recordings, two-bottle preference (TBP), and conditioned taste aversion (CTA) tests. On the whole, the results showed that the sense of taste in the hamster differs in many respects from that in humans because, of 26 tested compounds known as sweet to humans, 11 had no taste or tasted differen...

The early postnatal period represents a time of significant neural development. Neonatal exposure to stressors, environmental toxins, and many different pharmacological agents may have a significant impact on subsequent behavior and cognition in adulthood. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of early administration of the protein synthesis inhibitor, cycloheximide, on a battery...

conclusions: the results of the present study indicated that oral preparation of cm with an acceptable taste is feasible. background: chlorpheniramine maleate (cm) is widely used as an antihistaminic drug but it is very bitter and as yet no mouth dissolving/disintegrating taste-masked preparation that might be useful for pediatric and geriatric patients is available in the market. objectives: t...

T1r3 is a critical subunit of T1r sweet taste receptors. Here we studied how the absence of T1r3 impacts responses to sweet stimuli by taste neurons in the nucleus tractus solitarius (NTS) of the mouse. The consequences bear on the multiplicity of sweet taste receptors and how T1r3 influences the distribution of central gustatory neurons. Taste responses to glycine, sucrose, NaCl, HCl, and quin...

When a multisensory environment was reliably paired with morphine (2 mg/kg) in rats, that environment, in a drug-free test, evoked a hyperactive conditioned response (CR). When an olfactory cue (banana odor) was the only stimulus element reliably paired with morphine, it also elicited a hyperactive CR. However, a gustatory cue (saccharin solution) evoked a hypoactive CR. This taste-elicited dec...

Memory consolidation is defined temporally based on pharmacological interventions such as inhibitors of mRNA translation (molecular consolidation) or post-acquisition deactivation of specific brain regions (systems level consolidation). However, the relationship between molecular and systems consolidation are poorly understood. Molecular consolidation mechanisms involved in translation initiati...

A number of studies have related cholinergic activity to the mediation of learning and memory. However, the acetylcholine (ACh) participation has been recently implicated in the early stages of memory formation but not during retrieval. The aim of the present study is to evaluate ACh release in the insular cortex (IC) during presentation of different taste stimuli and during their re-exposition...

Emotional learning requires the coordinated action of neural populations in limbic and cortical networks. Here, we performed simultaneous extracellular recordings from gustatory cortical (GC) and basolateral amygdalar (BLA) neural ensembles as awake, behaving rats learned to dislike the taste of saccharin [via conditioned taste aversion (CTA)]. Learning-related changes in single-neuron sensory ...

In a two-bottle test, Sprague-Dawley rats preferentially consume a greater amount of hypotonic and isotonic NaCl solutions relative to water, whereas inbred Fischer 344 (F344) rats fail to prefer NaCl solutions at any concentration relative to water. To determine whether taste contributes to this strain difference, we measured the integrated neural responses of the chorda tympani nerve to a con...

The parabrachial nucleus (PBN) has been proposed as the associative site for conditioned taste aversion. Previous evidence has shown that functional blockade of the PBN by tetrodotoxin (TTX) produces retrograde disruption of lithium-induced taste aversions in rats. However, given the PBN role in processing visceral cues and the long duration of the lithium-induced aversive effects, an interpret...