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The taste of water

08.06.2017

How many flavors do we have? Now it is generally accepted that five: bitter, sweet, salty, sour and umami - the taste of protein foods. Some research suggests that the human tongue can also taste complex carbohydrates like starch or flour. Neuroscientist Zachary Knight of the University of California at San Francisco and some of his colleagues believe that one more taste should be added to this list - the taste of water.

The statement that water has no taste is attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. In the twentieth century, the assumption of the ancient thinker was confirmed by scientific experiments: a psychologist at the University of Florida, Linda Bartoshuk, calculated that human saliva contains more substances with a pronounced taste than drinking water. Which means water can't taste good to us, she decided.

It is only in recent years that facts have begun to accumulate that suggest that water has its own pronounced taste for us. It turned out, for example, that birds and amphibians have cells in their mouths whose receptor proteins selectively react to water, transmitting a signal to the brain that is felt as taste. Human brain scans have revealed several areas that respond to water, but not other liquids, on the tongue. But these data did not convince everyone: many scientists still believe that, savoring pure water, we feel only echoes of the taste of what we ate before.

Zechariah Knight's research has identified groups of neurons in the hypothalamus that fire when an animal is thirsty and when an animal has had enough water to stop drinking. Information that water enters the body should come to these neurons from the receptors of the tongue, and not from the stomach or other organs, the scientist believes, because animals stop drinking long before any other organ has time to determine that there is already enough water. .

Yuki Oka, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Pasadena, set out to find water-specific receptors in the tongue tissue. Experiments with genetically modified mice have shown that long-known receptors that transmit sour taste to the brain begin to work actively when they come into contact with clean water. To confirm the results, the mice were given a choice of water or a tasteless and odorless mineral oil. In mice, to which geneticists "turned off" those same acidic receptors, it was difficult to distinguish between water and oil.

And in the next experiment, scientists, artificially stimulating "sour" receptors, forced mice to take light for water and literally drink the blue glow of the optical fiber. The receptors worked, and it seemed to the mice that, by exposing their mouths to blue light, they felt the taste of water. The mice, who were very thirsty, licked the end of the optical cable 2000 times every 10 minutes. They never knew that the light was not water, but they didn't get drunk on it, and continued to attack the blue light for much longer than ordinary mice - water fountains. The scientists decided that the signal from the acid receptor could make the brain taste water, but the signal that there was enough water came from some other receptor.

Exactly how water molecules activate the "sour" receptors of the tongue is not yet clear. Perhaps the fact is that water washes off saliva with salts dissolved in it from the tongue, as a result of which the acidity of the cytoplasm of the cells of the tongue changes, and they begin to react in a special way to the presence of water. But this is still inaccurate.

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