Bitter Taste and Olfactory Receptors: Beyond Chemical Sensing in the Tongue and the Nose

Abstract

The Up-and-Coming-Scientist section of the current issue of the Journal of Membrane Biology features the invited essay by Dr. Mercedes Alfonso-Prieto, Assistant Professor at the Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ), Germany, and the Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Vogt Institute for Brain Research. Dr. Alfonso-Prieto completed her doctoral degree in chemistry at the Barcelona Science Park, Spain, in 2009, pursued post-doctoral research in computational molecular sciences at Temple University, USA, and then, as a Marie Curie post-doctoral fellow at the University of Barcelona, worked on computations of enzyme reactions and modeling of photoswitchable ligands targeting neuronal receptors. In 2016, she joined the Institute for Advanced Science and the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at the FZJ, where she pursues research on modeling and simulation of chemical senses. The invited essay by Dr. Alfonso-Prieto discusses state-of-the-art modeling of molecular receptors involved in chemical sensing - the senses of taste and smell. These receptors, and computational methods to study them, are the focus of Dr. Alfonso-Prieto's research. Recently, Dr. Alfonso-Prieto and colleagues have presented a new methodology to predict ligand binding poses for GPCRs, and extensive computations that deciphered the ligand selectivity determinants of bitter taste receptors. These developments inform our current understanding of how taste occurs at the molecular level.

Keywords: Bitter taste; Chemosensory receptors; ORs; Odorant; Olfaction; TAS2Rs.

Fig. 1

Computational model of TAS2R46 in complex with the bitter tastant strychnine, showing the two-site architecture explored in the simulations. The ligand pose in the vestibular site is colored in red, whereas the pose in the orthosteric site is in blue. Data were taken from reference (Sandal et al. 2015) (Color figure online)