Most people probably think that we perceive the five basic tastes—sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami (savory)—with our tongue, which then sends signals to our brain "telling" us what we've tasted. However, scientists ...
Nov 18, 2015
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Lidocaine—often used as a numbing agent for outpatient medical procedures—activates certain bitter taste receptors through two unique mechanisms that result in cancer cell death, according to researchers from the Perelman ...
Nov 22, 2023
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A bitter taste in the mouth is often a symptom or side effect of illness, which may be the result of how the body reacts to pathogens. A new study published in iScience, by Hong Wang, Ph.D., an Associate Member at the Monell ...
Aug 24, 2023
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If you can't stand broccoli, celery or kale, you may be a supertaster, and it just might protect you from COVID-19.
May 25, 2021
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Why do we like the bitter taste of coffee? Bitterness evolved as a natural warning system to protect the body from harmful substances. By evolutionary logic, we should want to spit it out.
Nov 15, 2018
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By tangling up bitter- and sweet-sensing cells on the tongues of mice, researchers have teased apart how the taste system wires itself. The results, from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator Charles Zuker at ...
Aug 9, 2017
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A team of University of Queensland researchers is investigating the surprising discovery that smell and taste receptors normally found in the nose and mouth can also be present on the human heart.
May 4, 2015
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According to new research from the Monell Center, receptors for stress-activated hormones have been localized in oral taste cells responsible for detection of sweet, umami, and bitter. The findings suggest that these hormones, ...
Jun 3, 2014
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Chinese researchers have identified a bacteria which may cause obesity, according to a new paper suggesting diets that alter the presence of microbes in humans could combat the condition.
Dec 19, 2012
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A new study from a team of researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, the Monell Chemical Senses Center, and the Philadelphia VA Medical Center, reveals that a person's ability to taste ...
Oct 8, 2012
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Taste (also called smatch or gustation; adjectival form: gustatory) is one of the traditional five senses. It refers to the ability to detect the flavor of substances such as food, certain minerals, and poisons, etc.
Humans receive tastes through sensory organs called taste buds, or gustatory calyculi, concentrated on the upper surface of the tongue.
The sensation of taste can be categorized into five basic tastes: sweet, bitterness, sour, salty, and umami. The recognition and awareness of umami is a relatively recent development in Western cuisine. MSG produces a strong umami taste.
As taste senses both harmful and beneficial things, all basic tastes are classified as either appetitive or aversive, depending upon the effect the things they sense have on our bodies.
The basic tastes contribute only partially to the sensation and flavor of food in the mouth — other factors include smell, detected by the olfactory epithelium of the nose; texture, detected through a variety of mechanoreceptors, muscle nerves, etc.; temperature, detected by thermoreceptors; and spiciness, or piquance, also called chemesthesis.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
