John Boughter, PhD, an associate professor in the University of Tennessee Health Science Center Department of Anatomy and Max Fletcher, PhD, assistant professor in the university’s Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology have received a $418,000 grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

The grant is part of the National Institutes of Health’s effort in taste sensory research.

The award, which will be distributed over two years, will support a project titled, “Taste Responses in Defined Cell Types in Gustatory Cortex.”

The study may help reveal how taste quality plays a crucial role when evaluating conditions such as obesity, diabetes, anorexia, hypertension and coronary artery disease. In this research, the focus will be on how taste quality is encoded in the gustatory cortex, an important area of the brain involved in ingestive decision making. The researchers use state-of-the-art imaging techniques to visualize the response of individual neurons to taste stimuli of different qualities.

“We will try to understand whether single cells respond to just one or multiple tastants,” said Boughter. “The location of these neurons in different cortical cell layers will be considered, and we will investigate taste responses in different cell types as well. Together, we anticipate that these approaches will allow for a new understanding of how the sense of taste is organized in the brain.”