Taste mapping: A new approach for the taste regions

Gustation is a chemical sense acting as an ultimate checkpoint for accepting a nutrient food or debunking a recognized toxic substance. Our gustatory system is a necessity for food detection as well for human survival. Our tongue is a muscular organ serving as a repertoire for the well-known theoretical diagram being taught at schools stating that our tongue is divided into sections: Bitter on the back, sour and salty bilaterally, sweet on the tip and umami in the middle. However, scientists at Columbia University studied 8,000 taste buds scattered on the tongue and reported that it is down to cells in the brain, not in the tongue, to work out which taste is which (O’callaghan J. 2014).Why are there parts of the tongue better at detecting some particular tastes? According to our survey, sweet and salty tastes were highly detected though it was the opposite for umami. Respectively, the interpretation of food targets the nerve like taste cells located on apical epithelial specialized taste buds. Those nerve signals reach the VPM in the thalamus, then, to be carried to the sensory cortices in the brain. Accumulated evidence proposed fatty acid as a new taste that has candidate receptors. In this prospective study, taste mapping was revealed experimentally that it does not exist. Statistically, we measured the percentage of tasty on the five specified regions (%) and its correlation with gender and smoking. Most evidence revealed fatty acid to be albeit with no taste quality at low concentration and unpleasant at a supra-threshold concentration by altering the texture. Free fatty acids differ in saturation and length suggesting the presence of complex mechanisms which do rely over more than one receptor. This could be a supporting step for the association between the oral exposure to fatty acid and obesity due to the minimized taste cues.