Sour ageusia in two individuals implicates ion channels of the ASIC and PKD families in human sour taste perception at the anterior tongue.

Background: The perception of sour taste in humans is incompletely understood at the receptor cell level. We report here on two patients with an acquired sour ageusia. Each patient was unresponsive to sour stimuli, but both showed normal responses to bitter, sweet, and salty stimuli.

Analysis of a human fungiform papillae cDNA library and identification of taste-related genes.

Various genes related to early events in human gustation have recently been discovered, yet a thorough understanding of taste transduction is hampered by gaps in our knowledge of the signaling chain. As a first step toward gaining additional insight, the expression specificity of genes in human taste tissue needs to be determined. To this end, a fungiform papillae cDNA library has been generated and analyzed.