Rats Fail to Discriminate Quinine from Denatonium: Implications for the Neural Coding of Bitter-Tasting Compounds

This work was supported by Grant R01-DC01628 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. We gratefully acknowledge Ed Rodgers for his technical help during data collection. We thank John I. Glendinning, Timothy Hackenberg, Philip Teitelbaum, Shachar Eylam, and Laura Geran for providing comments on a draft of this manuscript. Portions of this work were presented at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Chemoreception Sciences in Sarasota, FL, April 2001.

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Alan C. Spector, Department of Psychology, P.O. Box 112250, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-2250. E-mail: spector{at}ufl.edu.

^aAt the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Chemoreception Sciences held in Sarasota, FL, in April 2001, Lindsey and Breslin (2001) reported that humans have difficulty discriminating among various bitter-tasting compounds when intensity cues are eliminated.

^bThere is evidence that the α-subunit of gustducin is also expressed in brush cells in the epithelial lining of the stomach and intestine (Hofer, 1996).

^cOne rat in group 1 was removed from the experiment because of illness.