Using a molecular approach to understanding human taste perception, researchers have made a new finding demonstrating that each individual's personal set of taste-receptor alleles, or gene variations, codes for distinct receptor proteins that determine individual differences in bitter-taste perception. These differences in perception are ubiquitous, underscoring the idea that, owing to slight variations in our genes for taste receptors, we all live in our own "taste worlds." Thus, we all perceive everyday foods such as teas, coffees, vegetables, meats, beer, cheeses, wines, and chocolates in our own way, potentially with no two tasters exactly alike.

The reasons for these perceptual differences involve myriad genes and environmental influences, as well as the interplay between these two factors. The new finding regarding bitterness perception suggests that the taste-receptor genes and their multiple alleles play a dominant role in determining how we perceive the world of tastes.

The longest-recognized and most famous genetically determined taste difference among people is the ability to taste PTC (phenylthiocarbamide) as bitter. PTC taste sensitivity varies tremendously among people; the threshold amount of PTC perceptible by individuals varies over a 1000-fold difference in concentration. These different sensitivities form a bimodal distribution in almost every population examined, and this distribution was interpreted as evidence that simple genetic differences, possibly involving only a single gene, underlie the PTC perceptual phenotype. The result was an 80-year-old search for the gene, which was identified last year. In the new work, four teams of researchers, including Paul Breslin, Danielle Reed, and Christopher Tharp from the Monell Chemical Senses Center, Dennis Drayna and Un-Kyung Kim from the NIH, Bernd Bufe, Christina Kuhn, and Wolfgang Meyerhof from the German Institute of Human Nutrition (DiFE), and Jay Slack from the Givaudan Corporat
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Contact: Heidi Hardman
hhardman@cell.com
1-617-397-2879
Cell Press
21-Feb-2005

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