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Neuroscience

Salty sensations

Nature volume 494, pages 44–45 (2013)Cite this article

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Salt is important in health and disease, yet how mammals sense it is not completely clear. Evidence in worms suggests that TMC proteins, which are implicated in human hearing, are salt receptors involved in taste. See Letter p.95

Salt is one of the oldest and most common food seasonings. And, together with sweet, bitter, sour and the savoury taste umami, it forms the five modalities of taste1. Salt is essential for survival, but its intake has to be tightly controlled because overconsumption impairs ion balance and regulation of blood pressure. Indeed, depending on its concentration, salt can be attractive or repulsive in many vertebrates and invertebrates. Little is known about how organisms sense the main component of salt, sodium chloride. In mice, epithelial sodium channels are required for the creatures to exhibit attractive responses to the taste associated with low salt concentrations, but not for them to show aversion to high salt concentrations2. It is exciting, therefore, that on page 95 of this issue, Chatzigeorgiou et al.3 report a promising candidate for a salt sensorFootnote 1.

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Notes

  1. *This article and the paper under discussion3 were published online on 30 January 2013.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bertrand Coste is in the Ion Channels and Sensory Transduction Group, CRN2M, CNRS–Aix-Marseille University, Marseille 13015, France.,

    Bertrand Coste

  2. Ardem Patapoutian is in the Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience Department, Dorris Neuroscience Center, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, and at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation, San Diego, California 92121, USA.,

    Ardem Patapoutian

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  1. Bertrand Coste
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  2. Ardem Patapoutian
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Correspondence to Bertrand Coste or Ardem Patapoutian.

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Coste, B., Patapoutian, A. Salty sensations. Nature 494, 44–45 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11946

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