Gleanings

Abstract

Inherited differences in Taste Reactions. It has recently been shown that individuals differ in their capacity for tasting certain substances and that these differences are inherited. The results of an experiment with phenylthio-carbo-mide, made at the New Orleans meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, last December are recently published by Dr. A. F. Blakeslee and Dr. A. L. Fox (J1. Heredity Vol. 23 No. 3). Of 2550 persons tested 65.5% tasted the substance as bitter, 28% found it tasteless while 2.3% found it sour and 4.2% reported another taste. Earlier tests of families had shown that the failure to taste is inherited as a simple Mendelian recessive. When both parents. are non-tasters, all the children are the same. This was found to be the case in 39 children from such parents. Individuals also differ in the threshold of stimula-tion, some being able to detect the taste in a few drops of a 1/500,000 solution while some non-tasters require a hot saturated solution to perceive any taste at all. This substance which is bitter to most people, differs in dalcin, which is three hundred times sweeter than sugar, in that an atom of oxygen is replaced by sulphur. The related p-ethoxy-phenyl-thio-carbomide is identical in taste, but apparently gives a slightly weaker reaction.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.002071

Pages

464 - 466

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

Keywords