Nerdy Science Blog

Lab equipment repairman couldn’t bear with Greg Smutzer’s bad breath, so he offered him breath-freshening strips.  Greg Smutzer, director of Laboratory of Gustatory Psychophysics in the Biology Department of Temple’s College of Science and Technology, was inspired by those strips and came out with the idea of taste-testing strips.

Conventional taste testing is done in lab by a ’sip and spit’ test.  By playing a small amount of tastant into patient’s mouth and spit it out, the spitted liquid is then tested in the lab.  However there are a lot of shortcomings in this method.  The test is hard to administer outside the lab and also regions of tongue tested is not specific.

The developed taste-testing strips able to overcome the disadvantages of conventional method.  The edible strips have five different tastes, which are sweet, sour, salty, bitter and monosodium glutamate (umami taste).  The strip which is not in liquid form is easier to place them on a desired are of the tongue as different regions of the tongue respond to different tastes.  The strips can measure more effectively than standard ’sip and spit’ test at lower level tastant.

Greg Smutzer hopes to commercialize these strips and also develop detailed taste maps of the tongue surface in the future.

(news [journal])