TARGETING TASTE: Will doctors one day be able to drug taste receptors in the uterus to prevent preterm labor?© ISTOCK.COM/WANMONGKHOL
Over the past 15 years, researchers have begun to discover that the taste receptors that sense sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami flavors are found in tissues far removed from our mouths. For example, taste receptors expressed in the gut appear to play a role in digestion, while receptors in the airway may play a role in respiration.
When Ronghua ZhuGe, a physiologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, came across a 2010 study that had identified bitter taste receptors on human airway smooth muscle cells (Nat Med, 16:1299-304), he was intrigued. The paper’s authors had found that activation of these receptors caused the cells to relax, dilating the airway. The researchers hypothesized that calcium-activated potassium channels underlay the taste-mediated relaxation, but they didn’t ...
