The development of taste transduction and taste chip technology

The intrinsic perception process of taste is obviously far less known than those of vision, audition, touch and olfaction. Despite that taste cells utilize a variety of sensory mechanisms to translate plenty of gustatory sensations such as sour, sweet, bitter, salty and umami into cellular signals, gustatory perception mechanisms are still under exploration due to the lack of effective methods on cellular and molecular level. Recently the development of molecular biological and electrophysiological studies has promoted exploration of olfactory and gustatory transduction and coding mechanisms dramatically. Based on the studies of artificial olfaction, artificial taste and cell-based biosensor in our laboratory, this paper reviews the current research on taste transduction mechanism. We introduce the recent advances in cell chip that combined biology with microelectronics, discuss taste cell chip as well as its potential of prospective application in taste transduction mechanism in detail and propose the research trends of taste chip in future.