The Sense of Taste

Taste is the ability to respond to dissolved molecules and ions called tastants.
Humans detect taste with taste receptor cells. These are clustered in taste buds and scattered in other areas of the body.
Each taste bud has a pore that opens out to the surface of the tongue enabling molecules and ions taken into the mouth to
reach the receptor cells inside.
There are five primary taste sensations:

salty

sour

sweet

bitter

umami

Properties of the taste system.

A single taste bud contains 50100 taste cells representing all 5 taste sensations (so the classic textbook pictures
showing separate taste areas on the tongue are wrong).

Each taste cell has receptors on its apical surface. These are transmembrane proteins which
o

admit the ions that give rise to the sensation of salty;

bind to the molecules that give rise to the sensations of sweet, bitter, and umami.

A single taste cell seems to be restricted to expressing only a single type of receptor (except for bitter receptors).

A stimulated taste receptor cell triggers action potentials in a nearby sensory neuron leading back to the brain.

However, a single sensory neuron can be connected to several taste cells in each of several different taste buds.

The sensation of taste like all sensations resides in the brain [evidence].

And in mice, at least, the sensory neurons for four of the tastes (not sour) transmit their information to four
discrete areas of the brain.

Taste Receptors in Other Locations

Taste receptors have been found in several other places in the body. Examples:

Bitter receptors (T2Rs) are found on the cilia and smooth muscle cells of the trachea and bronchi [View] where
they probably serve to expel inhaled irritants;

Sweet receptors (T1Rs) are found in cells of the duodenum. When sugars reach the duodenum, the cells respond
by releasing incretins. These cause the beta cells of the pancreas to increase the release of insulin.
So the function of "taste" receptors appears to be the detection of chemicals in the environment a broader function than
simply taste.
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/T/Taste.html

The perception of flavor retronasal olfaction

Posted by Thierry Page on Tue, Feb 28, 2012 @ 08:17 PM

We are honoured to present you a special blog edition written by our guest author Dr.
Johannes Frasnelli.
Dr. Frasnelli specialises in odor perception. He conducts research in the field of
neurophysiology of smell and taste as well as therapy in loss of the chemical senses.
____________________________________________________________________
_Lets say we go for a walk through the city with a friend. At some point we are getting hungry
and we happen to walk by a rotisserie. As we walk through the fumes, we say to our companion:
This smells so nice; I would like to eat some grilled chicken. So we decide to enter the
rotisserie; as soon as we open the door the lovely smell of grilled chicken is getting even
stronger. We order and finally the waiter serves a plate with a beautiful grilled chicken. We start
eating, the chicken is impeccable, and with the first bite we take, we say to our companion:
This tastes so good, the chicken is just lovely. Our companion agrees, since he is as happy with
his chicken as we are. So, we both enjoy our food; the question is, are we both right? Are we
right when we say that food tastes good?
Lets first have a look at the sense of taste. With our sense of taste, we are able to perceive the
five basic tastes. They are: salty, sour, bitter, sweet and umami. We all know salty (for example,
salt), sour (for example, lemons), bitter (for example, coffee), and sweet (for example,
cherries); umami is less known. Umami, which is a Japanese word and means pleasant savory
taste; it indeed describes a savory taste as we find it in meat, tomatoes, mushrooms, parmesan
cheese etc.
However, these five basic tastes are not enough to perceive the flavor of food. Rather, we
perceive the flavor of food via the sense of smell! But how in the world would odor molecules
reach the nose when we have food in our mouth even if we close the mouth while chewing, as
we were taught when we were children? The solution to this is that the odor molecules use the
back entrance to get into the nose. From the oral cavity, they travel backwards, until they reach
the throat; the throat is connected to the nasal cavity (the inside of the nose) in the top, to the
oral cavity (the mouth in the middle), and in the bottom part it is connected to the larynx and
eventually to the trachea and the lungs as well as to the esophagus.Odor molecules can easily
travel from the mouth to the nose via this connection in the throat. So, they can reach the

olfactory receptors, and they can evoke a smell perception. The interesting thing is that we do
not realise that this happens in the nose, we have the impression that our perception stems
from the mouth; and therefore we say the chicken tastes good. We call this perception of
flavors retronasal olfaction, which means nothing else than smelling the back of the nose.

Source: http://www.drsharma.ca
It may be difficult to believe but we can actually test whether this is true. For example, if we
have a cold, our nose is stuffed. We cannot breathe through our nose, and we cant smell
anything. If we eat something during having a cold we also realise that every food tastes bland.
We are still able to perceive its sweetness, its saltiness, its bitterness, its saltiness, and its
savoriness, even if we have a blocked nose, but we would have a hard time to distinguish an
apple from a pineapple. Both are sweet and a bit sour, and we would still perceive this, but in
order to perceive the typical apple flavor and the typical pineapple flavor we have to rely on the
sense of smell. The access to the receptors of the sense of smell is however blocked, since the
nose is blocked when we have a cold; so we are not be able to perceive the flavors and
consequently we cannot distinguish apples from pineapples.
We can test retronasal olfaction even if we have no cold in a fun experiment. You need two
persons, one who is tested (the subject) and the other one who is testing (the experimenter).
The experimenter prepares different food with a similar texture; alternatively you can also use
candies with different flavors for this experiment. Similar texture is important, because we do
not need to perceive the flavor to distinguish a banana from an almond, we can do that by
feeling both fruits with the tongue. The experimenter picks two fruits (lets say strawberries and
ripe mangos; or apples and pineapples). The subject closes his eyes and pinches its nose. Then
the experimenter hands the subjects a spoon with a small piece of the fruit. The subject inserts
the fruit into the mouth while keeping the nose pinched. He should then try to identify the fruit.
You will see that this is very difficult to do. At some point the subject can unpinch the nose, and
all of a sudden he will have no problem in identifying the food.

Why is this? When the nose is pinched, much less air can travel to the nose, even from the back
and the odor molecules cannot reach the receptors. When however the nose is unpinched, air
travels freely through the nose, the odor molecules reach the receptors, and we perceive the
flavor.

As we see, flavor perception is mostly driven by the sense of smell. To come back to the
question we had in the beginning: we are not right if we say the food tastes good, we should
rather say it smells good, even if we are already eating it. The thing is: we probably do not care,
as long as the food is good.

http://blog.odotech.com/bid/83308/The-perception-of-flavor-retronasal-olfaction

How People See Foods Affects Flavor

Perception
April 12, 2013 News
NEW ORLEANSUnderstanding the effects of interactions between smell and vision and taste, as well as other
odorants, may open the door to developing healthful foods that look and smell more appealing to finicky kids or adults.
New research presented at the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) described
how people sometimes see" flavors in foods and beverages before actually tasting them.
There have been important new insights into how people perceive food flavors," said Terry E. Acree, Ph.D., Cornell
University. Years ago, taste was a table with two legstaste and odor. Now we are beginning to understand that flavor
depends on parts of the brain that involve taste, odor, touch and vision. The sum total of these signals, plus our emotions
and past experiences, result in perception of flavors, and determine whether we like or dislike specific foods."
Acree said people actually can see the flavor of foods, and the eyes have such a powerful role that they can trump the
tongue and the nose. The popular Sauvignon Blanc white wine, for instance, gets its flavor from scores of natural
chemicals, including chemicals with the flavor of banana, passion fruit, bell pepper and boxwood. But when served a glass
of Sauvignon Blanc tinted to the deep red of merlot or cabernet, people taste the natural chemicals that give rise to the
flavors of those wines.
The sense of smell likewise can trump the taste buds in determining how things taste. In a test that people can do at
home, psychologists have asked volunteers to smell caramel, strawberry or other sweet foods and then take a sip of plain
water; the water will taste sweet. But smell bread, meat, fish or other non-sweet foods, and water will not taste sweet.
While the appearance of foods probably is important, other factors can override it. Acree said that hashes, chilies, stews
and cooked sausages have an unpleasant look; however, people savor these dishes based on the memory of eating and
enjoying them in the past. The human desire for novelty and new experiences also is a factor in the human tendency to
ignore what the eyes may be tasting and listening to the tongue and nose, he added.
Sources:
American Chemical Society: Seeing the flavor of foods

Supertasters
Usually, it's great to have heightened senses like 20/20 visionor sharp hearing. But a heightened sense of
taste, no matter how delicious it might sound, is really no joy. Supertasters are people with two or sometimes
just one dominant allele for the geneTAS2R28. And although they can perceive more nuanced flavor in food
than nontasters, they often find common foods too bitter, sweet or spicy.
In the 1930s, a scientist at DuPont discovered that people had varying degrees of sensitivity to the chemical
PTC (phenylthiocarbamide). For some, PTC tasted shockingly bitter, but for the mystified minority, PTC had no
taste at all. Due to concerns about PTC's safety, scientists began studying people's reactions to PROP (6-npropylthiouracil), a synthetic compound used in thyroid medicine. For nontasters, PROP had no flavor; for
tasters, it was unpleasant and for supertasters, PROP slapped the tongue with an intense bitterness.
In 1991, Linda Bartoshuk, then of Yale Medical School, coined the name "supertasters" for the people with
acute PROP sensitivity and noticed that they had a denser covering of fungiform papillae than nontasters. She
linked the number of taste receptor cells to supertaste.
For supertasters, coffee, hoppy beer and vegetables like Brussels sprouts might be too bitter; cake and ice
cream might be too rich and chili peppers might be too hot. There are, however, a few advantages of super
taste-sensitivity.
Beverly Tepper, a scientist at Rutgers University, discovered that, at least among women in their 40s,
supertasters were 20 percent thinner than nontasters. With their heightened sensitivity to sugar and dairyfats,
supertasters are less likely to crave junky foods. They actually eat less food overall -- but, unfortunately, they
also skimp on leafy vegetables. Tepper saw no correlation between tasting and weight in men
[source: Flaherty].
With such stunning links developing between taste and body mass, scientists are eager to study taste
receptors as a possible factor in obesity. Yet just as flavor is more than taste, taste is more than a genetic

impulse. People's food preferences and eating habits are largely based on what they grew up on and even
what their mothers ate while pregnant.

http://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/taste4.htm