Taste remains one of the least-explored human senses. Cortical taste responses were investigated using neuroimaging in 40 subjects tasting a range of different taste stimuli compared to a neutral tasteless control. Activation was found in the anterior insula/frontal opercular taste cortex and caudal orbitofrontal cortex, both areas established as taste cortical areas by neuronal recordings in p...

Clinical taste testing in humans is far from being routinely performed in ear, nose and throat (ENT) clinics. Consequently, most reports on posttraumatic and postoperative taste disorders are case reports and mainly consist of qualitative (e.g. dysgeusia, metallic taste) taste changes after either head injury or ENT surgery. Since quantitative taste deficiencies (ageusia, hypogeusia) often go u...

Genetic approaches are rapidly yielding new information about our sense of taste. This information comes from both molecular studies of genes encoding taste receptors and other taste-signaling components, and from studies of inherited variation in taste abilities. Our understanding of bitter taste has advanced by combined information from discovery and study of the TAS2R family of taste recepto...

The sense of taste, or gustation, is mediated by taste buds, which are housed in specialized taste papillae found in a stereotyped pattern on the surface of the tongue. Each bud, regardless of its location, is a collection of ∼100 cells that belong to at least five different functional classes, which transduce sweet, bitter, salt, sour and umami (the taste of glutamate) signals. Taste receptor ...

Rats with neurotoxic lesions of the basolateral amygdala were trained in procedures designed to assess the formation of within-event, taste-odor associations. In Experiments 1 and 2 the animals were given initial exposure to a taste-odor compound; the value of the taste was then modified, and the consequent change in responding to the odor was taken to indicate that an odor-taste association ha...

Taste stimuli are detected by taste receptor cells present in the oral cavity using diverse signaling pathways. Some taste stimuli are detected by G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) that cause calcium release from intracellular stores, whereas other stimuli depolarize taste cells to cause calcium influx through voltage-gated calcium channels (VGCCs). Although taste cells use two distinct mecha...

In chickens, the sensory organs for taste are the taste buds in the oral cavity, of which there are ~240-360 in total number as estimated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). There is not an easy way to visualize all taste buds in chickens. Here, we report a highly efficient method for labeling chicken taste buds in oral epithelial sheets using the molecular markers Vimentin and α-Gustducin. ...

N-(1-Carboxyethyl)-6-hydroxymethyl-pyridinium-3-ol inner salt (alapyridaine), recently identified in heated sugar/amino acid mixtures as well as in beef bouillon, has been shown to exhibit general taste-enhancing activities, although tasteless on its own. Differing from other taste enhancers reported so far, racemic (R/S)-alapyridaine and, to an even greater extent (+)-(S)-alapyridaine, the phy...

BACKGROUND Using fungiform (FG) and circumvallate (CV) taste buds isolated by laser capture microdissection and analyzed using gene arrays, we previously constructed a comprehensive database of gene expression in primates, which revealed over 2,300 taste bud-associated genes. Bioinformatics analyses identified hundreds of genes predicted to encode multi-transmembrane domain proteins with no pre...