The bamboo-eating giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) has a sweet tooth: behavioral and molecular responses to compounds that taste sweet to humans.

ABSTRACT: A growing body of behavioral and genetic information indicates that taste perception and food sources are highly coordinated across many animal species. For example, sweet taste perception is thought to serve to detect and motivate consumption of simple sugars in plants that provide calories. Supporting this is the observation that most plant-eating mammals examined exhibit functional sweet perception, whereas many obligate carnivores have independently lost function of their sweet taste receptors and exhibit no avidity for simple sugars that humans describe as tasting sweet. As part of a larger effort to compare taste structure/function among species, we examined both the behavioral and the molecular nature of sweet taste in a plant-eating animal that does not consume plants with abundant

SUBMITTER: Jiang P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3966865 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature