Abstract
Taste is one of the main factors determining food choices. Differences in PROP bitter taste perception have been implicated in individual differences in food preferences and selection. The present study examined associations between, PROP phenotypes, self-reported food liking and TAS2R38 polymorphisms, the major gene implicated in PROP bitterness, in six different populations of the Caucasus and Central Asia, located along the ancient Silk Road. Differences in the distribution of PROP phenotypes across populations were detected, with a higher frequency of super tasters in Tajikistan (31.3%) and Armenia (39.0%) and a higher frequency of non tasters in Georgia (50.9%). While no relationships were observed between PROP phenotypes and food liking using standard statistical tests, we used an approach based on comparison of distance matrices derived from these data. The first matrix compared the food liking ratings of each population to all others pairwise using the Kruskal-Wallis test (at p<0.00063), and the second one compared the distribution of PROP phenotypes across all populations in a similar manner calculating the chi-square statistic as a distance measure. A strong correlation between the two matrices was found (Mantel test: r = 0.67, p-value = 0.03), suggesting that the pattern of food liking across populations was closely related to the distribution of PROP phenotypes. This same relationship was not observed when TAS2R38 genotypes were substituted for PROP phenotypes in this analysis. Our data suggest that a population-based approach utilizing distance matrices is a useful technique for detecting PROP-related differences in food liking and can be applied to other taste phenotypes.
Highlights
Bitter taste perception is a variable trait both within and between human populations, and large individual differences in responsiveness to bitterness have been well documented [1]
Bitter perception in humans is mediated by a family of 25 TAS2R taste receptors [2]
Considering the potential relationship between PROP perception and food liking reported in the existing literature [18,19–20,21–28,29], analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was performed to determine the influence of PROP taster status and TAS2R38 genotypes on liking of each food
Summary
Bitter taste perception is a variable trait both within and between human populations, and large individual differences in responsiveness to bitterness have been well documented [1]. Most population-based studies relating PROP-tasting to food and/or beverage selection have been conducted in Caucasian subjects residing in North America, Australia and Western Europe [19,20,21,22,23–28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40–41]. We examined relationships among PROP perception, TAS2R38 polymorphisms and food liking in different rural communities from the Caucasus region (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan), Central Asia (Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan) and Tajikistan.
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