Résumé
Taste is crucial for the sensory evaluation of food. This sense allows the detection of essential nutrients and toxic compounds. Human beings are able to discriminate five primary different taste qualities, sweet, umami (the taste of amino acids), bitter, salty, and sour. Tasting compounds are remarkably diverse chemically. They activate specialized detectors expressed in the oral cavity. In this chapter, we review the main tasting molecules known to generate these five tastes and trigeminal compounds. This chapter describes also the current knowledge on the physiology of taste, the integration of taste perception, and how taste-taste interaction occurs at the brain level.