Processing is a traditional pharmacy technology based on traditional Chinese medicine theory. The traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) ingredients should be processed before being used as a medicine. Processed bitter almonds are widely used in the clinic in TCM for the treatment of cough and asthma. In this work the amygdalin profile of three producing areas in China was determined, with respect ...

Nasal trigeminal chemosensitivity in mice and rats is mediated in part by epithelial solitary chemoreceptor (chemosensory) cells (SCCs), but the exact role of these cells in chemoreception is unclear. Histological evidence suggests that SCCs express elements of the bitter taste transduction pathway including T2R (bitter taste) receptors, the G protein alpha-gustducin, PLCbeta2, and TRPM5, leadi...

Nutrient intake and avoidance of toxins are essential for survival and controlled by attractive and aversive feeding responses. Drosophila melanogaster presents one of the best characterized systems for studies on chemosensation, which is mediated by multigene families of chemoreceptors, including olfactory receptors, gustatory receptors, and odorant-binding proteins (OBPs). Although the respon...

Bitter taste is one of the five basic taste sensations which is mediated by 25 bitter taste receptors (T2Rs) in humans. The mechanism of bitter taste signal transduction is not yet elucidated. The cellular processes underlying T2R desensitization including receptor internalization, trafficking and degradation are yet to be studied. Here, using a combination of molecular and pharmacological tech...

Variation exists in the sensitivity of individual rodents and humans to different bitter tastants. An absence of uniform correlation in responsiveness to different bitter substances across individuals within a species suggests heterogeneity in the mechanisms underlying stimulus processing within this taste modality. Here, we examined taste responsiveness of individual rats to three bitter compo...

The tastes of many bitter and sweet compounds are thought to be transduced via guanine nucleotide binding protein (G-protein)-coupled receptors, although the biochemical nature of these receptors is poorly understood at present. Gustducin, a taste-specific G-protein closely related to the transducins, is a key component in transducing the responses to compounds that humans equate with bitter an...

Detection of substances tasting bitter to humans occurs in diverse organisms including the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. To establish a molecular mechanism for bitter tastant detection in Dictyostelium, we screened a mutant library for resistance to a commonly used bitter standard, phenylthiourea. This approach identified a G-protein-coupled receptor mutant, grlJ(-), which showed a si...

The bitter taste serves as an important natural defence against the ingestion of poisonous foods and is thus believed to be indispensable in animals. However, vampire bats are obligate blood feeders that show a reduced behavioural response towards bitter-tasting compounds. To test whether bitter taste receptor genes (T2Rs) have been relaxed from selective constraint in vampire bats, we sampled ...

The fruit extracts of Citrus aurantium (bitter orange) are traditionally used as weight-loss products and as appetite supressants. An important fruit component is p-synephrine, which is structurally similar to the adrenergic agents. Weight-loss and adrenergic actions are always related to metabolic changes and this work was designed to investigate a possible action of the C. aurantium extract o...