OBJECTIVE It is becoming apparent that there is a strong link between taste perception and energy homeostasis. Recent evidence implicates gut-related hormones in taste perception, including glucagon-like peptide 1 and vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP). We used VIP knockout mice to investigate VIP's specific role in taste perception and connection to energy regulation. RESEARCH DESIGN AND ME...

The sense of taste is essential for the survival of virtually all animals. Considered a 'primitive sense' and present in the form of chemotaxis in many bacteria, taste is also a sense of sophistication in humans. Regardless, taste behavior is a crucial activity for the world's most abundant (insects) and most successful (mammals) inhabitants, providing a means of discrimination between nutrient...

Over the past several decades, dental researchers reported different aspects of oral submucous Fibrosis (OSMF). Yet, there is a big lacunae in the present scenario of evidence based dentistry which correlates the role of taste perception among OSMF affected individuals and areca nut chewers. The present study intends to assess and compare different taste perception among areca nut chewing, OSMF...

A growing body of behavioral and genetic information indicates that taste perception and food sources are highly coordinated across many animal species. For example, sweet taste perception is thought to serve to detect and motivate consumption of simple sugars in plants that provide calories. Supporting this is the observation that most plant-eating mammals examined exhibit functional sweet per...

Despite the fact that humans experience mixtures of odors and tastes each time they eat, little is known of their capacity to detect the individual components of foods. To investigate this capacity, 43 subjects were trained to identify three odors and three tastes and were required to indicate which of these could be identified in stimuli consisting of one to six components. Although the odor a...

Compared to the other senses, smell is linguistically challenged. Colors and shapes; tastes and textures, each have their armory. A tomato is ‘red’ and ‘round’. A lemon is ‘smooth’ to touch and has a ‘sour’ taste. Each sensory domain has its own lexical field: a set of words codifying the distinctions in that modality. Smell stands apart. When asked to name familiar, everyday scents English spe...

Umami taste is responsible for sensing monosodium glutamate, nucleotide enhancers, and other amino acids that are appetitive to vertebrates and is one of the five basic tastes that also include sour, salty, sweet, and bitter. To study how ecological factors, especially diets, impact the evolution of the umami taste, we examined the umami taste receptor gene Tas1r1 in a phylogenetically diverse ...

A remarkable amount of information has emerged in the past decade regarding sweet taste physiology. This article reviews these data, with a particular focus on the elucidation of the sweet taste receptor, its location and actions in taste transduction in the mouth, its nontaste functions in the gastrointestinal tract (e.g., in enteroendocrine cells), and the brain circuitry involved in the sens...

Bitter taste perception is innate and induces aversive reactions. Since numerous harmful compounds, including secondary plant metabolites, synthetic chemicals, inorganic ions and rancid fats, do taste bitter, this basic taste modality may be considered as a defence mechanism against the ingestion of potential poisons. For a complete understanding of this defence mechanism it is obligatory to id...

What is the relationship of Aurora kinases and cancer? All three members of the Aurora kinase family are overexpressed in multiple solid tumors, which is perhaps not surprising considering their functions in cell division. As more and more smallmolecule Aurora kinase inhibitors are being developed, these inhibitors can be used not only for cell-biological studies on the functions of Aurora kina...