Best Possible Taste

If you look in the mirror and poke out your tongue you’ll see it’s covered with tiny little bumps. These are lingual papillae, housing the tiny taste buds that enable you to enjoy your food. This image shows a close-up of one of the taste papillae on a mouse’s tongue, stained with fluorescent dyes that highlight DNA (blue) or other molecules (red and green). Researchers have discovered that a molecule called Hedgehog plays an important role in the development of taste papillae as a foetus grows in the womb, as well as keeping them healthy throughout adult life, regenerating every ten days. This explains why some cancer treatments that work by blocking Hedgehog can lead to patients losing their sense of taste. Understanding how this happens could help to improve cancer treatments in the future and also point to ways to help other people whose taste buds don’t function properly.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by Alexandre N. Ermilov, Archana Kumari and Libo Li, and colleagues
• University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Genetics, November 2016