 |
PAGE 1 OF 2
Within the past two decades, scientists have come to understand how water and
salts move in and out of cells through protein
channels in the cell membrane. This research, notably by 2003
Nobel laureates Roderick MacKinnon, an HHMI investigator at
The Rockefeller University, and Peter Agre, then at Johns Hopkins
University, provides an atom-level view of how our kidneys function
and how the heart pumps. It may also lead, in time, to new drug
targets and therapies.
Now, scientists are hunting for the receptors that enable the taste
of salt to register on the tongue—whether that salt pours from the
iconic blue and yellow Morton salt container or comes in pearlescent flakes from
the coast of France. HHMI investigator Charles
Zuker at the University of California, San Diego, has spent years
teasing apart the sensory network that allows mammals to experience taste.
Zuker and his collaborators, including Nicholas Ryba of
the National Institutes of Health, have identified receptors for four
of the five basic qualities of taste: sweet, bitter, umami or savory, and
sour. The salt receptor remains elusive.
This issue of the HHMI Bulletin highlights Zuker's research
and that of other HHMI scientists whose work connects the convergent senses of
taste and smell. They include HHMI investigators
like Richard Axel and Linda Buck—who shared the Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine in 2004—who have systematically mapped
the molecular, genetic, and cellular systems that generate our
perception of the external world through the sense of smell. They
also include Catherine Dulac, an HHMI investigator at Harvard
University, whose research probes the power of pheromones, tantalizing chemical
signals that influence animal (and perhaps human)
behavior. The discoveries made by these scientists generate new
questions: How is sensory information mapped in the brain? How is
the map used to generate an appropriate response? How does information generated
by odor receptors in the nose and taste receptors
in the tongue shape behavior?
Photo: Paul Fetters
|
|
|
