The Sweet Taste of Scientific Success
The Sweet Taste of Scientific Success
April 23, 2001 -- You might have thought your preference for a box of chocolates over, say, a mouthful of bitter lemons was just a matter of taste -- and so it is. But now two groups of researchers have tracked down the genetic underpinning for that taste.
The search for the proverbial sweet tooth ends at your tongue, they report, where a gene called T1r3 appears to produce a substance that recognizes sweetness as you eat and rushes out "ooh" and "ahh" signals to your brain.
Scientists from Harvard Medical School in Boston and Mt. Sinai Medical School in New York report the finding simultaneously this week in the journals Nature Genetics and Nature Neuroscience. Though both groups present strong evidence that T1r3 is the sweet-lovers gene, the findings await conclusive proof.
"It's a very provocative finding," says Jean-Pierre Montmayeur, PhD, lead author of the Nature Neuroscience report. "We feel we have a very strong candidate gene for sweet taste."
Previous work by some of the same scientists involved in this week's findings had established a general region of gene in mice that is associated with taste, Montmayeur explains. By comparing mice that were highly sensitive for sweetness with mice that could barely taste sweetness at all, researchers were able to narrow the hunt down to T1r3.
"Interestingly enough, it happens to be abundant in taste cells on the tongue," says Montmayeur, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.
The work by the two groups is a landmark in research on taste, one of the most complex and least understood senses. And it could spur discoveries of new artificial sweeteners that more closely mimic the naturally occurring sugars that the body craves -- high in nutritional value but far fewer calories, says Gopi Shanker, PhD, author of the Nature Genetics report.
As Shanker explains, perception of taste involves an enormously complex chain of events that begins on the cells of the tongue. Chemicals from food dissolve in saliva and contact the taste cells, which send an electrical signal to the brain. In the case of sweets, the signal is the familiar one of delight and a craving for more.
The Sweet Taste of Scientific Success.
April 23, 2001 -- You might have thought your preference for a box of chocolates over, say, a mouthful of bitter lemons was just a matter of taste -- and so it is. But now two groups of researchers have tracked down the genetic underpinning for that taste.
The search for the proverbial sweet tooth ends at your tongue, they report, where a gene called T1r3 appears to produce a substance that recognizes sweetness as you eat and rushes out "ooh" and "ahh" signals to your brain.
Scientists from Harvard Medical School in Boston and Mt. Sinai Medical School in New York report the finding simultaneously this week in the journals Nature Genetics and Nature Neuroscience. Though both groups present strong evidence that T1r3 is the sweet-lovers gene, the findings await conclusive proof.
"It's a very provocative finding," says Jean-Pierre Montmayeur, PhD, lead author of the Nature Neuroscience report. "We feel we have a very strong candidate gene for sweet taste."
Previous work by some of the same scientists involved in this week's findings had established a general region of gene in mice that is associated with taste, Montmayeur explains. By comparing mice that were highly sensitive for sweetness with mice that could barely taste sweetness at all, researchers were able to narrow the hunt down to T1r3.
"Interestingly enough, it happens to be abundant in taste cells on the tongue," says Montmayeur, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.
The work by the two groups is a landmark in research on taste, one of the most complex and least understood senses. And it could spur discoveries of new artificial sweeteners that more closely mimic the naturally occurring sugars that the body craves -- high in nutritional value but far fewer calories, says Gopi Shanker, PhD, author of the Nature Genetics report.
As Shanker explains, perception of taste involves an enormously complex chain of events that begins on the cells of the tongue. Chemicals from food dissolve in saliva and contact the taste cells, which send an electrical signal to the brain. In the case of sweets, the signal is the familiar one of delight and a craving for more.