Ever bitten into a hot pie, yelped "Hothothot!" then had your taste buds go on strike for the next week? Taste buds are a sensitive bunch.

Taste buds are specialised sensory organs that facilitate the detection of chemical stimuli, ultimately guiding dietary preferences and enabling protective reflexes. Composed of distinct cell types – ...

We’ve all heard of the five tastes our tongues can detect — sweet, sour, bitter, savory-umami and salty. But the real number is actually six, because we have two separate salt-taste systems. One of ...

We’ve all heard of the five tastes our tongues can detect: sweet, sour, bitter, savory-umami, and salty. But the real number is actually six, because we have two separate salt-taste systems. One of ...

Scientists have identified a gene that controls the development of taste buds. The gene, SOX2, stimulates stem cells on the surface of the embryonic tongue and in the back of the mouth to transform ...

In the early 1900s, Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda suggested that umami was a basic taste, like bitter, salty, sour, or sweet. It took about eight decades for the scientific community to officially ...

The tongue contains numerous taste buds-tiny sensory organs responsible for detecting taste. Taste buds consist of specialized cells that translate chemical stimuli into neural signals. Among them, ...

Some taste cells are multitaskers that can detect bitter, sweet, umami and sour stimuli, a new study finds. The research challenges conventional notions of how taste works. In the past, it was thought ...