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"Geschmack."
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BitterSweet: Building machine learning models for predicting the bitter and sweet taste of small molecules
The dichotomy of sweet and bitter tastes is a salient evolutionary feature of human gustatory system with an innate attraction to sweet taste and aversion to bitterness. A better understanding of molecular correlates of bitter-sweet taste gradient is crucial for identification of natural as well as synthetic compounds of desirable taste on this axis. While previous studies have advanced our understanding of the molecular basis of bitter-sweet taste and contributed models for their identification, there is ample scope to enhance these models by meticulous compilation of bitter-sweet molecules and utilization of a wide spectrum of molecular descriptors. Towards these goals, our study provides a structured compilation of bitter, sweet and tasteless molecules and state-of-the-art machine learning models for bitter-sweet taste prediction (BitterSweet). We compare different sets of molecular descriptors for their predictive performance and further identify important features as well as feature blocks. The utility of BitterSweet models is demonstrated by taste prediction on large specialized chemical sets such as FlavorDB, FooDB, SuperSweet, Super Natural II, DSSTox, and DrugBank. To facilitate future research in this direction, we make all datasets and BitterSweet models publicly available, and present an end-to-end software for bitter-sweet taste prediction based on freely available chemical descriptors.
Journal Article
The Unhealthy = Tasty Intuition and Its Effects on Taste Inferences, Enjoyment, and Choice of Food Products
Across four experiments, the authors find that when information pertaining to the assessment of the healthiness of food items is provided, the less healthy the item is portrayed to be, (1) the better is its inferred taste, (2) the more it is enjoyed during actual consumption, and (3) the greater is the preference for it in choice tasks when a hedonic goal is more (versus less) salient. The authors obtain these effects both among consumers who report that they believe that healthiness and tastiness are negatively correlated and, to a lesser degree, among those who do not report such a belief. The authors also provide evidence that the association between the concepts of \"unhealthy\" and \"tasty\" operates at an implicit level. The authors discuss possibilities for controlling the effect of the unhealthy = tasty intuition (and its potential for causing negative health consequences), including controlling the volume of unhealthy but tasty food eaten, changing unhealthy foods to make them less unhealthy but still tasty, and providing consumers with better information about what constitutes \"healthy.\"
Journal Article
Wild and domesticated Moringa oleifera differ in taste, glucosinolate composition, and antioxidant potential, but not myrosinase activity or protein content
Taste drives consumption of foods. The tropical tree
Moringa oleifera
is grown worldwide as a protein-rich leafy vegetable and for the medicinal value of its phytochemicals, in particular its glucosinolates, which can lead to a pronounced harsh taste. All studies to date have examined only cultivated, domestic variants, meaning that potentially useful variation in wild type plants has been overlooked. We examine whether domesticated and wild type
M
.
oleifera
differ in myrosinase or glucosinolate levels, and whether these different levels impact taste in ways that could affect consumption. We assessed taste and measured levels of protein, glucosinolate, myrosinase content, and direct antioxidant activity of the leaves of 36
M
.
oleifera
accessions grown in a common garden. Taste tests readily highlighted differences between wild type and domesticated
M
.
oleifera
. There were differences in direct antioxidant potential, but not in myrosinase activity or protein quantity. However, these two populations were readily separated based solely upon their proportions of the two predominant glucosinolates (glucomoringin and glucosoonjnain). This study demonstrates substantial variation in glucosinolate composition within
M
.
oleifera
. The domestication of
M
.
oleifera
appears to have involved increases in levels of glucomoringin and substantial reduction of glucosoonjnain, with marked changes in taste.
Journal Article
Reading the Renaissance
From 1932 to 1953, during the Black Chicago Renaissance,
numerous literary events were held within and for the
city’s Black community. In book clubs, public forums,
print reviews, little magazines, local programming, and other
public venues, Black women in particular debated the role of
literature in racial uplift efforts, set literary standards,
and acted as community gatekeepers for cultural production
during a time known as the Black Chicago Renaissance. Through
these inspiring efforts, a mix of publishers, well-known
authors, and everyday readers significantly fostered a robust
literary culture in the Windy City.
Reading the Renaissance constructs a reception history
of the Black women who read and reviewed, published and
promoted, and collected and curated literature of the era. Mary
Unger interprets how local figures such as Vivian G. Harsh, Ora
Morrow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Browning, Fern Gayden, and
Margaret Walker cultivated particular literary tastes through
collective acts of reading and reception. She does so by
recovering a network of readers, book clubs, literary
magazines, civic programs, and book businesses that Black women
created, led, and transformed during the early 1930s through
the early 1950s in Bronzeville, Chicago’s predominantly
Black South Side neighborhood. This illuminating work includes
close readings of texts alongside letters, scrapbooks, meeting
minutes, reviews, and other ephemera of local reading practices
to show how Black women facilitated diverse strategies of
reading while instructing community members how to engage a
variety of print cultures at the time. Unger demonstrates how
Black women readers influenced individual authors as well as
the norms and expectations of African American literature more
broadly, becoming important (yet too often overlooked) players
in American literary history.
eBook
Dual binding mode of “bitter sugars” to their human bitter taste receptor target
The 25 human bitter taste receptors (hTAS2Rs) are responsible for detecting bitter molecules present in food, and they also play several physiological and pathological roles in extraoral compartments. Therefore, understanding their ligand specificity is important both for food research and for pharmacological applications. Here we provide a molecular insight into the exquisite molecular recognition of bitter β-glycopyranosides by one of the members of this receptor subclass, hTAS2R16. Most of its agonists have in common the presence of a β-glycopyranose unit along with an extremely structurally diverse aglycon moiety. This poses the question of how hTAS2R16 can recognize such a large number of “bitter sugars”. By means of hybrid molecular mechanics/coarse grained molecular dynamics simulations, here we show that the three hTAS2R16 agonists salicin, arbutin and phenyl-β-D-glucopyranoside interact with the receptor through a previously unrecognized dual binding mode. Such mechanism may offer a seamless way to fit different aglycons inside the binding cavity, while maintaining the sugar bound, similar to the strategy used by several carbohydrate-binding lectins. Our prediction is validated a posteriori by comparison with mutagenesis data and also rationalizes a wealth of structure-activity relationship data. Therefore, our findings not only provide a deeper molecular characterization of the binding determinants for the three ligands studied here, but also give insights applicable to other hTAS2R16 agonists. Together with our results for other hTAS2Rs, this study paves the way to improve our overall understanding of the structural determinants of ligand specificity in bitter taste receptors.
Journal Article
Über Geschmack
Geschmacksdenken scheint heute einerseits ungültig geworden, anderseits der Geschmacksbegriff dennoch unentbehrlich geblieben zu sein. Der Vortrag fragt nach den Gründen. Er belegt zunächst die Übertragung des Begriffs auf andere Erscheinungen des Lebens im 19. Jahrhundert, besonders im politischen Denken. Er zeigt sodann die Wurzeln für die neue Zeit in Frankreich im 16. und 17. Jh., die weitere Ausbildung in England und Deutschland vor 1800, behandelt dann seine Entwicklung in der Slavia allgemein, sodann besonders bei Tschechen, Polen und Russen, jeweils von der Aufklärung im 18. Jh. bis zur Moderne im 20. Jh.
eBook
Aversive gustatory learning and perception in honey bees
Taste perception allows discriminating edible from non-edible items and is crucial for survival. In the honey bee, the gustatory sense has remained largely unexplored, as tastants have been traditionally used as reinforcements rather than as stimuli to be learned and discriminated. Here we provide the first characterization of antennal gustatory perception in this insect using a novel conditioning protocol in which tastants are dissociated from their traditional food-reinforcement role to be learned as predictors of punishment. We found that bees have a limited gustatory repertoire via their antennae: they discriminate between broad gustatory modalities but not within modalities, and are unable to differentiate bitter substances from water. Coupling gustatory conditioning with blockade of aminergic pathways in the bee brain revealed that these pathways are not restricted to encode reinforcements but may also encode conditioned stimuli. Our results reveal unknown aspects of honey bee gustation, and bring new elements for comparative analyses of gustatory perception in animals.
Journal Article
Polymorphic variants in Sweet and Umami taste receptor genes and birthweight
The first thousand days of life from conception have a significant impact on the health status with short, and long-term effects. Among several anthropometric and maternal lifestyle parameters birth weight plays a crucial role on the growth and neurological development of infants. Recent genome wide association studies (GWAS) have demonstrated a robust foetal and maternal genetic background of birth weight, however only a small proportion of the genetic hereditability has been already identified. Considering the extensive number of phenotypes on which they are involved, we focused on identifying the possible effect of genetic variants belonging to taste receptor genes and birthweight. In the human genome there are two taste receptors family the bitter receptors (TAS2Rs) and the sweet and umami receptors (TAS1Rs). In particular sweet perception is due to a heterodimeric receptor encoded by the
TAS1R2
and the
TAS1R3
gene, while the umami taste receptor is encoded by the
TAS1R1
and the
TAS1R3
genes. We observed that carriers of the T allele of the
TAS1R1
-rs4908932 SNPs showed an increase in birthweight compared to GG homozygotes Coeff: 87.40 (35.13–139.68) p-value = 0.001. The association remained significant after correction for multiple testing.
TAS1R1
-rs4908932 is a potentially functional SNP and is in linkage disequilibrium with another polymorphism that has been associated with BMI in adults showing the importance of this variant from the early stages of conception through all the adult life.
Journal Article
Bitter tastants and artificial sweeteners activate a subset of epithelial cells in acute tissue slices of the rat trachea
Bitter and sweet receptors (T2Rs and T1Rs) are expressed in many extra-oral tissues including upper and lower airways. To investigate if bitter tastants and artificial sweeteners could activate physiological responses in tracheal epithelial cells we performed confocal Ca
2+
imaging recordings on acute tracheal slices. We stimulated the cells with denatonium benzoate, a T2R agonist, and with the artificial sweeteners sucralose, saccharin and acesulfame-K. To test cell viability we measured responses to ATP. We found that 39% of the epithelial cells responding to ATP also responded to bitter stimulation with denatonium benzoate. Moreover, artificial sweeteners activated different percentages of the cells, ranging from 5% for sucralose to 26% for saccharin, and 27% for acesulfame-K. By using carbenoxolone, a gap junction blocker, we excluded that responses were mainly mediated by Ca
2+
waves through cell-to-cell junctions. Pharmacological experiments showed that both denatonium and artificial sweeteners induced a PLC-mediated release of Ca
2+
from internal stores. In addition, bitter tastants and artificial sweeteners activated a partially overlapping subpopulation of tracheal epithelial cells. Our results provide new evidence that a subset of ATP-responsive tracheal epithelial cells from rat are activated by both bitter tastants and artificial sweeteners.
Journal Article