Description
Product Characteristics:
The sense of taste is essential for the survival of organisms. For example, the ability to identify sweet-tasting foods enables animals to seek out food with high nutritive value, whereas the ability to identify bitter substances enables them to avoid the ingestion of potentially harmful substances. A family of integral membrane proteins are involved in taste perception and include T1R, which is involved in sweet taste perception and T2R, which is involved in bitter taste perception. Both types of taste receptors couple to various G proteins to initiate signal transduction cascades. Specifically, T2R38 is expressed in subsets of taste receptor cells of the tongue and exclusively in gustducin-positive cells. Variations in T2R38 are associated with the ability to taste the bitter chemical phenylthiocarbamide (PTC), also called thiourea tasting.
Subcellular location: Cell membrane
Synonyms: PTC, PTC bitter taste receptor, T2R38, T2R61, taste receptor, type 2, member 38, T2R38_HUMAN.
Target Information: This gene encodes a seven-transmembrane G protein-coupled receptor that controls the ability to taste glucosinolates, a family of bitter-tasting compounds found in plants of the Brassica sp. Synthetic compounds phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) and 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP) have been identified as ligands for this receptor and have been used to test the genetic diversity of this gene. Although several allelic forms of this gene have been identified worldwide, there are two predominant common forms (taster and non-taster) found outside of Africa. These alleles differ at three nucleotide positions resulting in amino acid changes in the protein (A49P, A262V, and V296I) with the amino acid combination PAV identifying the taster variant (and AVI identifying the non-taster variant). [provided by RefSeq, Oct 2009]