Questions tagged [gustation]

I've seen plenty of speculation online, but does anyone know of a scientific study or have a definitive argument? I'm thinking probably not sweet, because the deoxyribose sugar is bound in the structure of the helix. Salty, due to group I…

The senses of taste and smell in different fish classes are described as two distinct senses; smell is mediated by the nasal openings, and taste by epithelial taste buds. They are both forms of chemoreception and therefore it is not clear to me what…

I was trying to find out more about gustation and the transduction of sourness when I came across the supposed inward-rectifying potassium channel $\ce{K+_{ir} 2.1}$. Here's the thing, despite being inward rectifying, all the articles I read about…

For example, can the taste of pineapple be isolated to just a certain amount of "salty-taste-triggering-molecules" and "sweet-taste-triggering-molecules" etc.? Can our current understanding of the gustatory system predict the taste of a new…