These taste and smell clinics are focusing their research on better understanding the mechanisms involved in gustatory function and taste disorders such as dysgeusia.
It is also interesting to note that many common medicines have a bitter taste if chewed; the gustatory system apparently interprets these compounds as poisons.
Sodium chloride and sucrose elicited the largest response in the rat gustatory cortex in rats, whereas citric acid causes only a moderate increase in activity in a single neuron.