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Chemical Senses Advance Access originally published online on March 30, 2005
Chemical Senses 2005 30(4):299-316; doi:10.1093/chemse/bji025
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Chemical Senses vol. 30 no. 4 © The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

Contribution of {alpha}-Gustducin to Taste-guided Licking Responses of Mice

John I. Glendinning1, Lauren D. Bloom1, Maika Onishi1, Kun Hao Zheng1, Sami Damak2, Robert F. Margolskee2,3 and Alan C. Spector4

1 Department of Biological Sciences, Barnard College, Columbia University, 2 Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Mount Sinai College of Medicine, 3 Howard Hughes Medical Institute and 4 Department of Psychology, University of Florida, USA

Correspondence to be sent to: John I. Glendinning, Department of Biological Science, Barnard College, Columbia University, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, USA. e-mail: jglendinning{at}barnard.edu

We examined the necessity of {alpha}-gustducin, a G protein {alpha}-subunit expressed in taste cells, to taste-mediated licking responses of mice to sapid stimuli. To this end, we measured licking responses of {alpha}-gustducin knock-out (Gus–/–) mice and heterozygotic littermate controls (Gus+/–) to a variety of ‘bitter’, ‘umami’, ‘sweet’, ‘salty’ and ‘sour’ taste stimuli. All previous studies of how Gus–/– mice ingest taste stimuli have used long-term (i.e. 48 h) preference tests, which may be confounded by post-ingestive and/or experiential effects of the taste stimuli. We minimized these confounds by using a brief-access taste test, which quantifies immediate lick responses to extremely small volumes of sapid solutions. We found that deleting {alpha}-gustducin (i) dramatically reduced the aversiveness of a diverse range of ‘bitter’ taste stimuli; (ii) moderately decreased appetitive licking to low and intermediate concentrations of an ‘umami’ taste stimulus (monosodium glutamate in the presence of 100 µM amiloride), but virtually eliminated the normal aversion to high concentrations of the same taste stimulus; (iii) slightly decreased appetitive licking to ‘sweet’ taste stimuli; and (iv) modestly reduced the aversiveness of high, but not low or intermediate, concentrations of NaCl. There was no significant effect of deleting {alpha}-gustducin on licking responses to NH4Cl or HCl.

Key words: taste, {alpha}-gustducin, brief-access taste test, knock-out mice


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