TEACHING HIGHLIGHTS OF THE MONTH: NOVEMBERWOLFGANG MEYERHOF
| Who: | Professor Wolfgang Meyerhof |
| Title: | Impact of Taste on Diet |
| Abstract: | Humans and mammals use their sense of taste to sample information about the chemical properties of their food. They distinguish five basic taste qualities: sweet, umami, bitter, sour and salty, with each quality having a separate physiological role. Perception initiates on the tongue and other parts of the oral cavity through the interaction of taste compounds with specialized receptor cells that are assembled into morphologically distinct structures. The receptor cells are specifically excited by stimuli of only one taste quality for which they use definite receptor proteins and signaling molecules. Thus, taste receptors represent the devices that translate chemical structures into sensations and, through their biochemical properties, determine sensory sensitivities. Taste receptors exist as variants creating different tongues in different people and accounting for perceptual diversity in the human population. Excitation of taste receptor cells elicits nerve impulses that are conveyed in discrete steps to the cerebral cortex, where the activities of nerve cells represent information about the chemical content of the oral cavity. This information is integrated with other sensory information, such as sight and smell of food in the context of nutrition. Metabolic consequences of ingested food form taste memory traces that determine future handling of known and novel foods. |
| Bio: | Wolfgang Meyerhof studied biochemistry in Hannover and Berlin, Germany. He reached his PhD in 1984 at the Free University of Berlin with research in developmental biology. His postdoctoral training from 1984 to 1986 at Berlin and Bern, Switzerland, in molecular biology was based on the analysis of globin gene functions in the clawed frog X. laevis. As research associate from 1986 to 1994, University Hospital Hamburg, Wolfgang Meyerhof cloned and analyzed the structure, function and regulation of various neuropeptide hormone receptors. Since 1994 he is a university professor for molecular genetics at the University of Potsdam and Head of the Department of Molecular Genetics at the German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke. His current research interest is molecular biology of taste. In 2000, he won the German-French Gay-Lussac/Humboldt prize. |
| When: | 11.15am, Friday November 3, 2006 |
| Where: | UNISG Pollenzo campus |
| For more info: | info@unisg.it |