The molecular basis of peripheral taste transduction

The sense of taste allows organisms to evaluate the quality of the food they consume with each of the five basic taste qualities fulfilling a specific subtask. The recent years have seen the molecular identification and characterization of sweet, umami, bitter and sour taste receptors. Their discovery allowed tremendous progress to be made in the understanding of peripheral taste transduction and quality coding. The present review summarizes the recent advances in taste transduction and gives an outlook over the next steps to go.