Several studies have shown that taste-responsive cells in the brainstem taste nuclei of rodents respond to sensory qualities other than gustation. Such data suggest that cells in the classical gustatory brainstem may be better tuned to respond to stimuli that engage multiple sensory modalities than to stimuli that are purely gustatory. Here, we test this idea by recording the electrophysiologic...

Neoculin occurring in the tropical fruit of Curculigo latifolia is currently the only protein that possesses both a sweet taste and a taste-modifying activity of converting sourness into sweetness. Structurally, this protein is a heterodimer consisting of a neoculin acidic subunit (NAS) and a neoculin basic subunit (NBS). Recently, we found that a neoculin variant in which all five histidine re...

Serotonin and the 5HT(1A) receptor are expressed in a subset of taste receptor cells, and the 5HT(3) receptor is expressed on afferent fibers innervating taste buds. Exogenous administration of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, paroxetine, has been shown to increase taste sensitivity to stimuli described by humans as sweet and bitter. Serotonergic agonists also decrease food and fluid...

AIM This was to validate a taste test on healthy school children. A cross-sectional study was designed to perform a standardised clinical evaluation of the gustatory sensitivity. MATERIALS AND METHODS Forty (18 males and 22 females) children were selected. Inclusion criteria were age between 5 and 12 years, absence of systemic disease and no antibiotic treatment in the last six months. The...

The rat vallate papilla is bilaterally innervated by the IXth nerve whose axons are required for the normal development of its several hundred taste buds. Temporary denervation during the developmental sensitive period for taste buds prevented most vallate taste buds from forming. Specifically, removing one IXth nerve and crushing the other in 3 day old neonates eliminated axons from the vallat...

When rats are forced to drink a morphine solution as their only source of fluid, they eventually reverse their initial preference and drink more morphine than water in a two-bottle preference test. The cause of this shift in preference was examined with the taste reactivity test which involves the analysis of fixed action patterns elicited by taste solutions infused into rats' mouths. Three mor...

The effect of soluble starch (acid-modified starch) on taste intensity was investigated in human subjects. Different concentrations of sucrose (Suc), six sweeteners, NaCl, quinine-HCl (QHCl) and citric acid (Cit) were dissolved in either distilled water (DW; standard) or starch solution (test solution). The solutions were presented to naive subjects and each subject was requested to taste and c...

Most of the research on cortical processing of taste has focused on either the primary gustatory cortex (GC) or the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). However, these are not the only areas involved in taste processing. Gustatory information can also reach another frontal region, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), via direct projections from GC. mPFC has been studied extensively in relation to its ro...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate changes in taste threshold in patients with chronic otitis media with effusion (COME) and their relationship with body mass index. A relationship has been suggested between pediatric obesity and COME, and we hypothesized that changes in taste function may occur in children with COME and that such changes may be associated with changes in body weight. DESIGN A prospective...

Flavor is produced by the integration of taste, olfaction, texture, and temperature, currently thought to occur in the cortex. However, previous work has shown that brainstem taste-related nuclei also respond to multisensory inputs. Here, we test the hypothesis that taste and olfaction interact in the nucleus of the solitary tract (NTS; the first neural relay in the central gustatory pathway) i...