苦味受体基因家族功能和演化研究的最新进展
摘要
The perception of bitter taste, as a defensive mechanism against ingestion of toxins, plays a very vital role in animal’s life because it can help animals avoid intake of poisonous substances. The ability of bitter taste detecting is extremely differential among vertebrates, which may mainly be due to their diverse living environment and dissimilar food preference. The bitter taste perception is initially mediated by the interaction between bitter tastants and their receptors. Thus, the studies of bitter taste genes (<italic>T2R</italic>) provide us an opportunity to understand the molecular basis of bitter taste perception. More recently, more and more ligands of bitter taste receptors were described <italic>in vitro</italic> functional assays. On the other hand, with the available of many vertebrate genome sequences, the study on the evolution of bitter taste receptor gene has got great progress. Studying evolutionary force can trace the change patterns of the function of bitter taste receptors in different species which can help us find more ligands of bitter taste receptors. In this review, we focus on the latest advances on the function and evolution of <italic>T2R</italic> gene family in vertebrates. Then, we propose some visions on the future studies of <italic>T2R</italic> gene family.