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...

While our understanding of the molecular and cellular aspects of taste reception and signaling continues to improve, the aberrations in these processes that lead to taste dysfunction remain largely unexplored. Abnormalities in taste can develop in a variety of diseases, including infections and autoimmune disorders. In this study, we used a mouse model of autoimmune disease to investigate the u...

Two conditioned taste aversion experiments with rats assessed the relative effectiveness in providing evidence of within-compound learning of different procedures that involve the initial compound presentation of two stimuli, A and X, with the unconditioned stimulus (i.e., AX+). In Experiment 1, following a single AX+ trial, groups A+ and B+ received an additional conditioning trial (i.e., infl...

Studies have reported that some animals, including humans, can taste mixtures of glucose oligomers (i.e., maltooligosaccharides, MOS) and that their detection is independent of the known T1R2/T1R3 sweet taste receptor. In an effort to understand potential mechanisms underlying the taste perception of glucose oligomers in humans, this study was designed to investigate: 1) the variability of tast...

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 ...