The cells and peripheral representation of sodium taste in mice
By Jayaram Chandrashekar, C. Kuhn, Yuki Oka, David A. Yarmolinsky, E. Hummler, N. Ryba, C. Zuker. Nature, 2010
640 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Salt taste in mammals can trigger two divergent behavioural responses. In general, concentrated saline solutions elicit robust behavioural aversion, whereas low concentrations of NaCl are typically attractive, particularly after sodium depletion. Notably, the attractive salt pathway is selectively responsive to sodium and inhibited by amiloride, whereas the aversive one functions as a non-selective detector for a wide range of salts. Because amiloride is a potent inhibitor of the epithelial sodium channel (ENaC), ENaC has been proposed to function as a component of the salt-taste-receptor system. Previously, we showed that four of the five basic taste qualities—sweet, sour, bitter and umami—are mediated by separate taste-receptor cells (TRCs) each tuned to a single taste modality, and wired to elicit stereotypical behavioural responses. Here we show that sodium sensing is also mediated by a dedicated population of TRCs. These taste cells express the epithelial sodium channel ENaC, and mediate behavioural attraction to NaCl. We genetically engineered mice lacking ENaCα in TRCs, and produced animals exhibiting a complete loss of salt attraction and sodium taste responses. Together, these studies substantiate independent cellular substrates for all five basic taste qualities, and validate the essential role of ENaC for sodium taste in mice.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Nutrition and Dietetics, Sensory Systems
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0c0f644f38341e8dea868feadfa1bec900fbd992
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In Biomedical Engineering
In Nutrition and Dietetics
In Sensory Systems
Citations in the corpus
- The cell biology of taste (2010, background): “This notion was recently confirmed by knocking out a critical ENaC subunit in taste buds, which impaired salt taste detection (Chandrashekar et al., 2010).”