Gustation: Sense of Taste

Taste and smell are chemical senses.

They give us information about the chemical composition

of our surroundings.

Taste is an immediate sense - a final checkpoint for the

acceptability of food before it enters the body.

Smell is a more distant sense allowing us to detect small

concentrations of airborne substances.
 Taste
• Diet regulation
• Last chance to detect a poison prior to 
ingestion
Only five primary tastes can be distinguished:

sour
sweet
bitter
salty

The umami taste recently described as “ meaty”.

 Anatomy of 
Taste
Papillae
• Circumvilliate
• Folliate
• Filliform Circumvilliate

• Fungiform Folliate

Filliform

Fungiform
 Anatomy of Taste
• Taste Receptors 
• Taste Buds occur on the soft palate and on 
some Papillae ­ Foliate, Circumvallete, 
Fungiform, Filliform (no taste buds)
• About 10,000 taste buds
• The supporting cells surround about 50
gustatory receptor cells.

• A single long microvillus called a gustatory hair

project from each gustatory receptor cell to the
external surface through the taste pore, an
opening in the taste bud.

• Basal cells, found at the periphery of the taste

bud near the connective tissue layer, produce
supporting cells, which then develop into
gustatory receptor cells with a life span of about
10 days.
 Central Gustatory Pathway

    Taste buds ­> 
Solitary Tract 
(part of the 
Medulla) ­> 
Thalamus ­> 
Frontal Lobe
 Properties of Taste

• The dimensions of taste

Sour

Salty

Bitter
Sweet
 Properties of Taste
• Taste preferences for familiar food
• Single trial learning ­ taste aversion
• Self­Balancing diet