Lecture 1: Mammalian Taste Perception

Lecture 1: Mammalian Taste Perception
Why can mammals taste?

 Taste gives pleasure to eating but not why it evolved
 It evolved to accept or reject food we consume
 There are 5 primary tastes: sweet, umami, bitter, sour and salty
o Sweet and umami is a good taste  find them pleasing because it signifies smth
beneficial that we are consuming (mostly carbs which are energy sources which
will help power our lives)
o Umami is a savoury taste as it indicates presence of amino acids in what we are
consuming, and AA are building blocks for our proteins  appetizing as it makes
us eat these kinda foods more
o Bitter is a bad taste  most thing that taste bitter are noxious or poisonous
compound that is harmful to us so we would eat less of it
o Sour is also a bad taste and it indicates smth that has gone bad  the acidic
taste might come from food that have degraded ; fruits that are not ripe also
taste sour so the plants use it to stop them from being consumed early before
the seeds are ready to be sent into the environment
o Salty can be good or bad  lil is good too much is bad; so good or bad flavour is
dependent on its concentration and this taste helps maintain electrolyte balance
so we don’t eat too much or too less of it
 Taste is not a physical property of a compound like there is no specific taste thing in the
structure of say carbs its more dependent on what receptors the food binds to on the
tongue
 Taste is innate so smth you are born with
o Two bottle experiment where there is two diff flavours of water at each time
sweet water, salty water and sour water vs. regular water and then saw which
one the rats preferred; these rats have not been exposed to any of those
flavours before and it tried to see the rats innate preference to the regular water
or the flavoured water
o Shows concentration dependent preference to the flavours
 Taste can be modified
o Beer taste study which had 2 diff beers and asked ppl to choose which one was
better
o Put some acid in one of the beers and wanted to see if It impacted the taste of
the beer with acid
o Had blind which got 2 beers without info, for one setting they were told abt the
special brew before they sampled and for another setting they told them abt the
special beer after they sampled
o Adding the acid to the beer made it more tasteful to the participants
o Showed how we can be talked into making smth taste better or worse
 Taste is also psychologically related (smth more expensive might be perceived to taste
better)
Anatomy of taste:
 Taste buds imbedded in tongue papillae
 There are diff types of papillae
o Fungiform which is at the tip of the tongue
 Kinda mushroom shaped
 Most abundant papillae in our tongue (most dominant)
o Foliate which is 2nd most abundant and its leaf like so taste buds are on the side
o Valiate are in the midline of the tongue ish and has a hill like structure
 All this taste info is send to gustatory cortex
o There are 2 nerves that goes from papillae to gustatory cortex
o Glossopharyngeal nerve
o Facial nerve  innervates facial muscle so we make facial experience according
to what we taste
 Taste bud location  taste bud map aint right as each bud has cells in it that can taste
all the different tastes
o These receptors then send info to the brain and
depending on the line message comes through
the brain determines taste (oh msg came thru
red line so food is sweet)
o Labelled line model is what we find in models
which is showed thru another 2-bottle
experiment
o Can manipulate preference if u say put a bitter receptor in a sweet cell so you
can make the person want the bitter thing
 Primary gustatory cortex
o Different parts of the gustatory cortex is responsible for different kinds of taste
 Taste receptors
o Umami taste receptors are dimers
 1 part has t1r1 and other part is t1r3
 Respond to L-glutamate (so like msg and stuff)
 These receptors also respond to nucleotide enhancers
o Sweet taste receptors are also dimers
 1 side is t1r2 and other is t1r3
 Tastes sweet proteins, glycine
o Bitter has -30 T2Rs
o Sodium so salty food taste is based on ENaC which is a channel
o Sour for acidic taste PKD2Ls
o Pandas cant taste umami (so cant taste amino acid) so they cant eat meat
 Had loss of function in t1r1 protein but they cant digest plants properly
so they poop a lot
o Whales also have lost taste perception because they swallow their prey and
there is nth to choose

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Lecture 1: Mammalian Taste Perception

Why can mammals taste?

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