PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Lauren Shaw
AU  - Corrine Mansfield
AU  - Lauren Colquitt
AU  - Cailu Lin
AU  - Jaime Ferreira
AU  - Jaime Emmetsberger
AU  - Danielle R. Reed
TI  - Personalized expression of bitter ‘taste’ receptors in human skin
AID  - 10.1101/364901
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 364901
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/09/364901.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/09/364901.full
AB  - The integumentary (i.e., skin) and gustatory systems both function to protect the human body and are a first point of contact with poisons and pathogens. These systems may share a similar protective mechanism because both human taste and skin cells express mRNA for bitter ‘taste’ receptors (TAS2Rs). Here, we used gene-specific methods to measure mRNA from all known bitter receptor genes in adult human skin from freshly biopsied samples and from samples collected at autopsy from the Genotype-Tissue Expression project. Human skin expressed some but not all TAS2Rs, and for those that were expressed, the relative amounts differed markedly among individuals. For some TAS2Rs, mRNA abundance was related to sun exposure (TAS2R14, TAS2R30, TAS2R42, and TAS2R60), sex (TAS2R3, TAS2R4, TAS2R8, TAS2R9, TAS2R14, and TAS2R60), and age (TAS2R5), although these effects were not large. These findings contribute to our understanding of extraoral expression of chemosensory receptors.