Ever bitten into a hot pie, yelped "Hothothot!" then had your taste buds go on strike for the next week? Taste buds are a ...

Taste buds are specialised sensory organs that facilitate the detection of chemical stimuli, ultimately guiding dietary preferences and enabling protective reflexes. Composed of distinct cell types – ...

We’ve all heard of the five tastes our tongues can detect — sweet, sour, bitter, savory-umami and salty. But the real number is actually six, because we have two separate salt-taste systems. One of ...

We’ve all heard of the five tastes our tongues can detect: sweet, sour, bitter, savory-umami, and salty. But the real number is actually six, because we have two separate salt-taste systems. One of ...

Scientists have identified a gene that controls the development of taste buds. The gene, SOX2, stimulates stem cells on the surface of the embryonic tongue and in the back of the mouth to transform ...

In the early 1900s, Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda suggested that umami was a basic taste, like bitter, salty, sour, or sweet. It took about eight decades for the scientific community to officially ...

Researchers at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have revealed the detailed structure of the bitter taste receptor, a protein called TAS2R14, and have shown ...

Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda first proposed umami as a basic taste — in addition to sweet, sour, salty and bitter — in the early 1900s. About eight decades later, the scientific community ...

Sweet-sensing taste cells, supported by the protein c-Kit, show remarkable resilience when nerves are damaged, unlike other taste cells that quickly degenerate. Blocking c-Kit with the drug imatinib ...