Sukumaran Lab

The taste system is the first to physically encounter ingested food and is in many ways a gatekeeper of nutrition. Unhealthy eating habits, such as the overconsumption of sugars, fats, and salt are the major causes of lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension.

Taste buds, located primarily on the surface of the tongue but also on other locations in the oral cavity such as the soft palate, contain several types of taste receptor cells that sense and transduce taste signals. The receptors and downstream signaling components for sweet, bitter, low salt, sour, and umami taste qualities are known, while those for high salt remain unidentified. Taste nerves carry taste signals from taste cells to the gustatory cortex through a relatively well defined (at least in rodents) neural pathway, that gives rise to taste guided behaviors.

A poorly studied aspect of taste biology is how the oral microbiome and the mucosal immune responses they trigger affect taste signaling.

Current projects in the lab aim to identify pathways regulating taste signaling and taste-microbiome interactions, using multiple approaches such as single cell and spatial RNASeq, molecular genetics, histology, behavioral studies, and calcium imaging in conditional knockout mice and cultured taste organoids.