IMAGINE your taste buds being altered to make cardboard taste like candy. That’s pretty much what has been done to mice – they’ve been genetically engineered so that a normally flavourless substance tastes sweet. The work reveals how the brain perceives tastes.
There are five basic tastes – sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami (savoury) – recognised by receptors on the surface of cells on the tongue and palate. But until now it has not been clear how the brain processes their signals.
To investigate, a team including Nicholas Ryba of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research in Bethesda, Maryland, looked…
