Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Comment
. 2003 Feb 7;112(3):293-301.
doi: 10.1016/s0092-8674(03)00071-0.

Coding of sweet, bitter, and umami tastes: different receptor cells sharing similar signaling pathways

Yifeng Zhang  1 , Mark A Hoon, Jayaram Chandrashekar, Ken L Mueller, Boaz Cook, Dianqing Wu, Charles S Zuker, Nicholas J P Ryba
Affiliations
Free article
Comment

Coding of sweet, bitter, and umami tastes: different receptor cells sharing similar signaling pathways

Yifeng Zhang et al. Cell. .
Free article

Abstract

Mammals can taste a wide repertoire of chemosensory stimuli. Two unrelated families of receptors (T1Rs and T2Rs) mediate responses to sweet, amino acids, and bitter compounds. Here, we demonstrate that knockouts of TRPM5, a taste TRP ion channel, or PLCbeta2, a phospholipase C selectively expressed in taste tissue, abolish sweet, amino acid, and bitter taste reception, but do not impact sour or salty tastes. Therefore, despite relying on different receptors, sweet, amino acid, and bitter transduction converge on common signaling molecules. Using PLCbeta2 taste-blind animals, we then examined a fundamental question in taste perception: how taste modalities are encoded at the cellular level. Mice engineered to rescue PLCbeta2 function exclusively in bitter-receptor expressing cells respond normally to bitter tastants but do not taste sweet or amino acid stimuli. Thus, bitter is encoded independently of sweet and amino acids, and taste receptor cells are not broadly tuned across these modalities.

PubMed Disclaimer

Comment on

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

Publication types

MeSH terms