Human Perception of Taste and the Causal Genes: A Literature Review
Raimonda Meškienė, Lina Viniarskaitė, Valentina Ginevičienė, Algimantas Irnius, Vaidutis Kučinskas
Summary
This review concerns nutrition genetics and genomics aspects. Nutrigenetics explores the influence of genetic variation on the selection of food and eating itself depend on a number of genes and their interaction with environmental factors. Taste is usually the main criteria determining eating habits of an individual including the choice and food absorption. Each individual has a unique set of taste receptors and sense of taste. This is caused by the genes coding for specific taste receptors. For example there are gene families of receptor coding genes associated with the perception of sweet, receptors. CD36 is a candidate gene which is possibly responsible for the taste of fat and the consumption of fat rich food. This gene may also play a part in the pathogenesis of glucose intolerance, atherosclerosis, secondary hypertension, diabetes, cardiomyopathy and Alzheimer disease. The differences in the sequence of taste receptor genes within or between different populations may have a significant effect on the response to taste specificity. The individuality of taste perception is associated with genetic variation and expression of taste receptor coding genes. These differences may be of key importance a person’s choice of food, development of eating habits and health.
Keywords: nutrigenetics, taste perception, taste receptors, genes.
