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bitter taste

This shows a man eating a lemon, and a brain.

·September 21, 2025·5 min read

AI Reveals Bitter Taste Receptors’ Hidden Role in Gut-Brain Health

Researchers used AlphaFold3, the latest AI-based protein modeling system, to predict the structures of all 25 known human bitter taste receptors (T2Rs). Compared with AlphaFold2, AF3 consistently generated more accurate structural predictions when benchmarked against experimentally determined data.

Featured Neuroscience

·April 10, 2024·5 min read

How the Brain Perceives Bitter Taste

A new study sheds light on how we perceive bitter tastes, revealing the detailed structure of the TAS2R14 bitter taste receptor for the first time. By pinpointing where bitter substances bind to TAS2R14 and understanding its activation mechanism, scientists have laid the groundwork for developing treatments that could regulate taste receptors to address conditions like obesity and diabetes.

Featured Neuroscience Open Neuroscience Articles

·January 23, 2023·5 min read

Chicory, Surrogate and Roasted Coffee Provide New Insights Into Mechanisms of Taste Perception

The bitter compounds of chicory exhibit a receptor activation profile that overlaps with roasted coffee compounds, resulting in a similar taste profile. However, the impact on three taste receptors differs between the substances.

Featured Genetics Neuroscience Open Neuroscience Articles

·November 15, 2018·3 min read

Why We Shouldn’t Like Coffee, But We Do

Researchers question why many of us are unable to live without our daily cup of coffee. According to a new study, bitter tastes are a natural warning system to protect the body from harmful substances, yet people with heightened ability to detect the bitter taste of coffee learn to associate it with positive things and tend to drink more than those with lower sensitivity. Researchers say this sensitivity is caused by genetic variants.