A Bad Taste

Sweet chocolate, salty crackers, sour lemons, bitter coffee and the umami hit of Parmesan cheese: all of these flavours are detected by our taste buds. As well as bringing us a world of delicious flavours from the foods we eat, taste buds play a vital role in helping us to determine whether it’s likely to be good for us or potentially harmful. These images show the taste buds in young mice, stained with a blue fluorescent dye that highlights nerve fibres. The buds on the right with few nerves are from animals lacking a molecule called beta-catenin, which sends signals between cells, while the ones on the left are from an unaffected mouse. Some newly-developed drugs for treating cancer in humans work by blocking beta-catenin signals, so there’s a risk they may affect patients’ taste buds too – something that might potentially be avoided by reactivating the signals in the tongue.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by Dany Gaillard and colleagues
• Department of Cell & Developmental Biology and the Rocky Mountain Taste & Smell Center, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, CO, USA
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Genetics, August 2017