Peptide interactions with taste receptors: Overlap in taste receptor specificity

Summary Two hitherto unrelated areas of taste appear to provide an important insight into a class of taste receptor sites. A region of the sweet protein monellin is similar to a savory tasting beef octapeptide, and this peptide region could represent an overlap in the specificity of binding to a common peptide taste receptor site. Such an overlap in binding specificity explains the low but significant level of sweetness observed with savory tasting stimuli.The work from this laboratory was supported by NIH Research Grant No. NS-15740 from NINCDS and by the Veterans Administration.