TASTE PERCEPTION: FROM ANATOMICAL TO MOLECULAR LEVEL

Taste plays an essential role in food selection and consequently overall nutrition. Our sense of taste helps us to gain information to form a picture of the world by sampling chemicals from our environment. Till now five basic taste modalities have been elucidated: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami, however in last years also fatty acid taste is perhaps becoming six scent of taste and existence of more basic tastes is still under debate. Each of these basic tastes has distinct functions. Umami and sweet taste are caloric detectors, eliciting positive hedonic tone, salt taste is important in maintaining sodium levels and is especially important in herbivores, sour taste contributes to recognition of unripe and spoiled food and bitter taste is assumed to detect toxins in the food. We can sense sweet (carbohydrates) and umami (proteins), therefore it would be sensibly to expect that we can sense fat. Each of the taste modalities is eliciting responses through its type of receptors, which are located in different taste buds, on different papillae in diverse areas of the tongue and its surroundings and influencing different nerves to activate taste recognition. Different channels and receptors, including seven transmembrane receptors (7TM receptors) on their own or by group effort, on example heterodimerization, are involved in taste perception by triggering diverse signaling pathways simultaneously in parallel or diametrically. This article reviews all by now known taste modalities from anatomical basis of taste perception till molecular mechanisms.