Tastes like Chicken: Developmental research on taste buds.

 



 

Chinese, chicken wings, ice cream, pizza why do some people like these particular foods and some people loath them? It’s on the tip of your tongue, or actually the whole surface! All the little bumps and buds on your tongues surface known as your taste buds determine what foods you like or dislike with a passion. According to Medical News Today the identification of the gene that controls taste bud development you can determines why you like the crazy foods you do. The gene SOX2 stimulates the stem cells on the surface of the embryonic tongue and in the back of the mouth.  Not only the gene itself but the abundance of the gene is important to determining what taste buds form. If there is to much of the SOX2 gene the taste buds may not even form at all.

These findings on taste bud growth are  important in the study of stem cells. Like the cells that make up your skin the cells on your tongue are constantly sloughed off and replaced by new cells. This new knowledge provides insight to the way stem cells operate not only in embryonic development but also the development  of cells into adulthood.

Larysa Pevny Ph. D. a geneticist and developmental neurobiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is co-author with Hogan of the journal report, did her initial research on mice. Pevny combine the mouse SOX2 gene with a gene in jelly fish that produces a protein called enhanced green fluorescent protein, that glows green when exposed to ultraviolet light. The gene allowed her to track any activity of the SOX2 gene under ultraviolet light. She determined that the SOX2 gene is present in high amounts during the development of the taste buds.  When altered to be produced in low levels taste buds did not but rather “scaly” cells that cover the surface of the tongue and aid in moving food to the back of the mouth.

Pevny hopes to use her research to better understand stem cells as well as do research in helping cancer patients that loose there taste buds during treatments. More knowledge of the SOX2 gene as well as other stem cells could lead to a better understanding of developmental diseases and how to prevent them.