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Chemical Senses Advance Access originally published online on December 29, 2005
Chemical Senses 2006 31(3):221-225; doi:10.1093/chemse/bjj022
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org The online version of this article has been published under an open access model. Users are entitled to use, reproduce, disseminate, or display the open access version of this article for non-commercial purposes provided that: the original authorship is properly and fully attributed; the Journal and Oxford University Press are attributed as the original place of publication with the correct citation details given; if an article is subsequently reproduced or disseminated not in its entirety but only in part or as a derivative work this must be clearly indicated. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

The Liaison of Sweet and Savory

Veronica Galindo-Cuspinera and Paul A.S. Breslin

Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA

Correspondence to be sent to: Paul A.S. Breslin, Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. e-mail: breslin{at}monell.org

The sense of taste provides humans with necessary information about the composition and quality of food. For humans, five basic tastes are readily distinguishable and include sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and savory (or umami). Although each of these qualities has individualized transduction pathways, sweet and umami tastes are believed to share a common receptor element, the T1R3 receptor subunit. The two G-protein–coupled heteromer receptors that comprise an umami stimulus receptor (T1R1–T1R3) and a sweetener receptor (T1R2–T1R3) constitute a potential link between these two qualities of perception. While the role of the individual monomers in each human heteromer has been examined in vitro, very little is known of the implication of this research for human perception, or specifically, how sweet and savory taste perceptions may be connected. Using a psychophysical approach, we demonstrate that lactisole, a potent sweetness inhibitor that binds in vitro to hT1R3, also inhibits a significant portion of the perception of umami taste from monosodium glutamate. Following the molecular logic put forward by Xu et al. (2004, Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA, 101, 14258–14263), our psychophysical data support the in vitro hypothesis that the shared T1R3 monomer moderates the activation of both T1R2 and T1R1 in humans and impairs suprathreshold perception, respectively, of sweetness and, to a lesser degree, umaminess in the presence of lactisole.

Key words: GMP, IMP, inhibition, lactisole, MSG, synergy, umami


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