Mimicking the Biological Sense of Taste In Vitro Using a Taste Organoids‐on‐a‐Chip System

Abstract

Thanks to the gustatory system, humans can experience the flavors in foods and drinks while avoiding the intake of some harmful substances. Although great advances in the fields of biotechnology, microfluidics, and nanotechnologies have been made in recent years, this astonishing recognition system can hardly be replaced by any artificial sensors designed so far. Here, taste organoids are coupled with an extracellular potential sensor array to form a novel bioelectronic organoid and developed a taste organoids-on-a-chip system (TOS) for highly mimicking the biological sense of taste ex vivo with high stability and repeatability. The taste organoids maintain key taste receptors expression after the third passage and high cell viability during 7 days of on-chip culture. Most importantly, the TOS not only distinguishs sour, sweet, bitter, and salt stimuli with great specificity, but also recognizes varying concentrations of the stimuli through an analytical method based on the extraction of signal features and principal component analysis. It is hoped that this bioelectronic tongue can facilitate studies in food quality controls, disease modelling, and drug screening.

Biomimetic Wearable Sensors: Emerging Combination of Intelligence and Electronics

“…The taste receptors/cells/tissues in the sensing unit can simulate the sensory mechanism of the human taste system, achieving highly sensitive and selective detection, which is the most commonly used and highly regarded method ( Figure 13 a–c ). [ 158 ] The key is to maintain the vitalities and stabilities of taste receptors/cells/tissues in vitro. Recently, Wang et al.…”

“…[ 158 , 159 ] More recently, they have constructed a taste organoids‐on‐a‐chip system based on the mechanism of endogenous receptor expression in cells. [ 158b ] Because of the excellent self‐renewal activities of the taste progenitor cells extracted from C57 mice, the expressive taste receptor cells can retain high cell viabilities to recognize taste stimuli and produce observable changes of extracellular field potentials over seven days, enabling the system to mimic the mammalian taste system to recognize varying degrees of sour, sweet, bitter, and salty tastes. The high biocompatibility indicated by the cell experimental results demonstrates the possibility of system applications in wearable electronics.…”

“…Reproduced under terms of the CC‐BY license. [ 158a ] Copyright 2020, Jeonghee Yeom et al., published by American Association for the Advancement of Science, AAAS. b) An in vitro taste organoid system with self‐renewal capability.…”

“…Reproduced under terms of the CC‐BY license. [ 158b ] Copyright 2023, Jianguo Wu et al., published by John Wiley and Sons. c) Schematic illustration of the taste sensing system based on taste cells and the extracellular matrix of the tongue.…”

Organoid assessment technologies

“…developed a taste organoids‐on‐a‐chip system (TOS) with bioelectronic organoids to simulate the taste system. The TOS accurately recognizes taste sensations by extracting signal features from stimuli concentrations and using principal component analysis 95 . These innovations hold potential for advancing pain and taste research.…”