ABSTRACT
The present review of taste bud development focuses on cellular control mechanisms. The classical embryology of tongue and palate and the development of electrophysiological responses of gustatory neurons in rat and sheep have been reviewed elsewhere. 1•2 The development of electrophysiological taste responses is considered in Chapter 5. An important objective of developmental studies is to describe the sequence of cell and tissue changes that lead to the adult form. This constitutes a search for developmental mechanisms that generalize widely both across species and across taste buds found at different locations in the same species. This is not to imply that variations across species and taste bud populations are uninteresting. It is quite remarkable, for example, that the maturation of chorda tympani nerve responses to NaCI is profoundly delayed in sheep,3 rat,4 and mouse,5 but not in the hamster chorda tympani6 nor in the IXth nerve of mouse and sheep. 5•7 The molecular and behavioral implications of these nerve and species differences should prove to be interesting.
