Unlike other primates, the reason why humans don’t eat insects raw

Most people like umami.

Maude Baldwin, a sensory biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, said: "With regard to the evolution of umami, there is always such a problem: in the human body , Our receptors are only regulated by glutamate, and we never have a good answer

In 2011, Toda, then working at the University of Tokyo and now leading a research team at Meiji University in Japan, and Takami Misaka of the University of Tokyo, developed a strategy using cultured cells to analyze The function of taste receptors

In order to use leaves as a new source of protein, the ancestors of large primates (including humans) developed umami taste receptors as glutamate receptors

——Yasuka Toda, Meiji University

As part of the project, Toda and Misaka also established a partnership with Takashi Hayakawa, the team leader at Hokkaido University in Japan, and Hiroo Imai, a biologist at Kyoto University

In the latest contemporary biological research, Toda and his colleagues verified this hypothesis

Then, the research team compared the DNA codes of receptors of different species and constructed a chimera between the receptors of spider monkeys (most sensitive to glutamate) and squirrel monkeys (most sensitive to free nucleotides) to determine the responsible valley.

The author next explores the relationship between diet and receptor sensitivity

Addison Kemp, a biological anthropologist at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study, said that the variety of research methods used by the authors is "impressive.

Researchers have shown in their research that the T1R1/T1R3 receptors of ring-tailed lemurs show affinity for glutamate and free nucleotides, "but this is a representative of them in this very, very diverse branch.

In addition, lemurs and slow loris “tend to maintain a better sense of smell because they have a wider range of olfactory genes, and the interaction between taste and smell is very important in the eating experience,” she said

The research results show that “the sensory system is very flexible and can evolve new adaptive sensory abilities.