A range of psychophysical taste measurements are used to characterize an individual's sweet taste perception and to assess links between taste perception and dietary intake. The aims of this study were to investigate the relationship between four different psychophysical measurements of sweet taste perception, and to explore which measures of sweet taste perception relate to sweet food intake. ...

The recent discovery of mammalian bitter, sweet, and umami taste receptors indicates how the different taste qualities are encoded at the periphery. However, taste representations in the brain remain elusive. We used a genetic approach to visualize the neuronal circuitries of bitter and sweet tastes in mice to gain insight into how taste recognition is accomplished in the brain. By selectively ...

BACKGROUND The sense of smell is very influential in the taste of foods. If the smell pleases us, we anticipate the taste of the food with a great deal of relish. If our sense of smell is impaired, so is our taste. The effect of appliance on taste perceptions has always had a controversial subject. MATERIALS AND METHODS The present study was designed to analyze the change in taste perception ...

Thermal tasters (TTs) perceive thermally induced taste (thermal taste) sensations when the tongue is stimulated with temperature in the absence of gustatory stimuli, while thermal non tasters (TnTs) only perceive temperature. This is the first study to explore detailed differences in thermal taste responses across TTs. Using thermal taster status phenotyping, 37 TTs were recruited, and the temp...

The sense of taste is responsible for the detection and ingestion of food to cover energetic requirements in health and disease. The change in taste perception might lead to malnutrition that is usually one of the frequent causes of morbidity and mortality in patients with cancer. In this review, we summarize the mechanisms of taste perception and how they are altered in cancer. We also address...

Sensory systems define an animal's capacity for perception and can evolve to promote survival in new environmental niches. We have uncovered a noncanonical mechanism for sweet taste perception that evolved in hummingbirds since their divergence from insectivorous swifts, their closest relatives. We observed the widespread absence in birds of an essential subunit (T1R2) of the only known vertebr...

Behavioral reaction to different taste qualities affects nutritional status and health. 6-n-Propylthiouracil (PROP) tasting has been reported to be a marker of variation in taste perception, food preferences, and eating behavior, but results have been inconsistent. We showed that l-Arg can enhance the bitterness intensity of PROP, whilst others have demonstrated a suppression of the bitterness ...

Taste perception has been studied frequently in young and older adult groups. This paper systematically reviews these studies to determine the effect of ageing on taste perception and establish the reported extent of sensory decline. Five databases were searched from 1900 to April 2012. Articles relating to healthy ageing in human subjects were included, reviewed and rated (Downs and Black scor...

Notable progress has been made relating individual differences in bitter taste sensitivity to specific alleles and TAS2R receptors, but psychophysical evidence of reliable phenotypes for other tastes has been more elusive. In this issue, Wise and Breslin report a study of individual differences in threshold sensitivity to sour and salty taste, which, though failing to find clear phenotypes, exe...

The taste system is one of our fundamental senses, responsible for detecting and responding to sweet, bitter, umami, salty, and sour stimuli. In the tongue, the five basic tastes are mediated by separate classes of taste receptor cells each finely tuned to a single taste quality. We explored the logic of taste coding in the brain by examining how sweet, bitter, umami, and salty qualities are re...