What are Olfaction and Gustation, And Do All Animals Have Them?

Chem Senses. 2024 Feb 29:bjae009. doi: 10.1093/chemse/bjae009. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTDifferent animals have distinctive anatomical and physiological properties to their chemical senses that enhance detection and discrimination of relevant chemical cues. Humans and other vertebrates are recognized as having two main chemical senses, olfaction and gustation, distinguished from each other by their evolutionarily conserved neuroanatomical organization. This distinction between olfaction and gustation in vertebrates is not based on the medium in which they live because the most ancestral and numerous vertebrates, the fishes, live in an aquatic habitat and thus both olfaction and gustation occur in water and both can be of high sensitivity. The terms olfaction and gustation have also often been applied to the invertebrates, though not based on homology. Consequently, any similarities between olfaction and gustation in the vertebrates and invertebrates have resulted from convergent adaptations or shared constraints during evolution. The untidiness of assigning olfaction and gustation to invertebrates has led some to recommend abandoning the use of these terms and instead unifying them and others into a single category - chemical sense. In our essay, we compare the nature of the chemical senses of diverse animal types and consider their designation as olfaction, oral gustation, extra-oral gustation, or simply chemoreception. Properties that we have found useful in categorizin...
Source: Chemical Senses - Category: Biochemistry Authors: Source Type: research