Taste Buds in the Brain

As soon as you bite into a peach you almost immediately taste something that is sweet on your tongue. And many of us know that your taste buds are linked to something in your brain that relays the taste of the food that you are eating. However, what does this system look like in a human, or other mammal? Scientists at NIH and Howard Hughes Medical Center have further looked into how we perceive taste and linked the savory, sweet, bitter and salty tastes to specific areas of the brain in mice. Tastes, according to Nicholas J. P. Ryba of NIH, are the firing of a set of neurons in the brain. Previous research only looked at particular cells of the brain and the neuron activity with different tastes. They discovered that the same neuron in the brain was activated with different tastes. So to look more into this scientists used a method called two-photon calcium imaging. The way this works is, when a neuron is activated a wave of calcium is released. With this being said, the amount of calcium that is released can measure the level of activity. The researchers put fluorescent die in the cells of the mice brains as well in order for the cells to light up everytime calcium was released. This allowed the research team to look at a plethora of cells at one time in the brain of the mice. Scientists have been creating maps of the brain for a variety of different things. This map of taste in the brain has challenged the work of researchers for many years now and with this breakthrough they can look further into how our brain interprets different textures of foods in the mouth and how we remember certain flavors of foods.

See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110901142110.htm

Posted by Ian Berry