Credit: Eric HuntI do love me some sprouts! Greens, bitters, strong flavors of all sorts. I've always been like this. Some of this is surely environment. My family comes from a part of South Asia known for its love of bracing and bold sensation. But perhaps I was born this way? There's a fair amount of evidence that taste has a substantial genetic component. This does not mean genes determine what one tastes, but it certainly opens the door for passive gene-environment correlations. If you do not find a flavor offensive, you are much more likely to explore it depths, and cultivate your palette.
Dost thou dare?Credit: W.A. DjatmikoAnd of course I'm not the only one with a deep interest in such questions. With the marginal income available to us many Americans have become "foodies," searching for flavor bursts and novelties which their ancestors might never have been able to comprehend. More deeply in a philosophical sense the question of qualia reemerges if there is a predictable degree of inter-subjectivity in taste perception (OK, qualia is always there, though scientific sorts tend to view it as intractable in a fundamental sense). But there's heritability, and then there's genes. We know that perception in some ways is heritable, but what is perhaps more interesting is if you can peg a specific genomic location to it. Then the evolutionary story becomes all the richer. And so it is with the locus TAS2R16, where a nonsynonymous mutation at location 516 seems to result in heightened sensitivity to bitter tastes. More specifically, it's rs846664, and the derived T allele is fixed outside of Africa, while the ancestral G allele still segregates at appreciable fractions within African populations. A new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution puts this locus under a microscope, though it does not come up with any clear conclusions. Origin and Differential Selection of Allelic Variation at TAS2R16 Associated with Salicin Bitter Taste Sensitivity in Africa presents some interesting findings. First, let's look at the distribution of the variation in their sample populations at the SNP of most particular interest:
RegionPopulationT516G
