As consumers surrend to the appeal of prepared –read “junk”– meals that lure the stomach with yummy looking snapshots, researchers are investigating new ways to offer a healthier alternative. “With the sequencing of the human genome all the machinery of taste began to be understood…so that allowed us to think of ways of applying drug discovery technology to make new molecules that would modify your sense of taste, ” explains chemist Ray Salemme, from Linguagen Corporation

The company is working to block bitter signals to the brain, as it could reduce the salt some manufacturers use to make bitter foods taste good.

The process involves manipulating about 10,000 taste buds that regenerate every two weeks. As you eat, food molecules like salt attach to a receptor that binds to that molecule. Then, nerve fibers connected to the taste cell shoot signals to the brain, where five universal flavors—salty, bitter, sweet, sour and a savory flavor called umami—register. “We can put so called screening tools in place to measure compounds on the specific receptors and we can use that as a strategy to find molecules that in some cases will turn them off,” Salemme says.

Via Science Central.
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