Abstract
Functional diversification of taste cells is crucial for proper discrimination of taste qualities. We found the homeodomain protein Skn-1a (Pou2f3) to be expressed in sweet, umami and bitter taste cells. Skn-1a–deficient mice lacked electrophysiological and behavioral responses to sweet, umami and bitter tastes, as a result of a complete absence of sweet, umami and bitter cells and the concomitant expansion of sour cells. Skn-1a is critical for generating and balancing the diverse composition of taste cells.
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Change history
13 July 2011
In the version of this article initially published, the labels for NaCl and citric acid were reversed in Figure 2c. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Y. Sato for assistance with the BAC library screening, the staff of the Research Resource Center, RIKEN, for assistance with generating chimeric and transgenic mice, and T. Kondo for useful comments on the manuscript. This work was supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (16688006 and 18688020 to I.M., 21780121 to M.O., and 16108004 and 20380183 to K.A.) and Innovative Areas (Systems Molecular Ethology, Y.Y.) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan, a grant from the Research and Development Program for New Bioindustry Initiatives (K.A.), an Ajinomoto Amino Acid Research Program research grant (I.M.), and US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders research grant R03 DC011143 (I.M.).
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I.M. and K.A. designed the experiments. I.M., M.O. and Y.Y. generated the transgenic and gene-targeting mice. I.M. and M.O. performed histological experiments. M.N. performed electrophysiological and behavioral experiments. I.M. and M.O. analyzed the data. I.M., Y.Y. and K.A. wrote the paper.
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Matsumoto, I., Ohmoto, M., Narukawa, M. et al. Skn-1a (Pou2f3) specifies taste receptor cell lineage. Nat Neurosci 14, 685–687 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2820
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2820
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