Figure 4.

Correlation between taste detection thresholds of individual mice from 4 different strains: C57BL/6J (B6, circles), SWR/J (SWR, triangles); 129P3/J (129, squares); DBA/2J (DBA, diamonds) for sucrose vs. glucose (a), sucrose vs. glycine (b) and glucose vs. glycine (c). The B6 and SWR strains (so called “taster” strains) possess an allelic form of Tasr3 that has been shown to be responsible for the relatively greater preferences of these mice for low concentrations of many sweeteners compared with mice from the 129 and D2 strains (so called “non-taster” strains) which possess a different allele. The effect of the allelic variation could be seen in the ability of the mice to detect sucrose and glucose in a psychophysical task. As would be predicted, sucrose thresholds correlated highly with glucose thresholds. However, glycine thresholds did not correlate as well with those for the two sugars presumably because this amino acid binds with both the T1R2+3 and T1R1+3 heterodimers and activation of the latter is not affected by this particular allelic variation of Tas1r3. Reprinted from Eylam and Spector [23] with permission from Oxford University Press