Licking for taste solutions by potassium-deprived rats: Specificity and mechanisms

Abstract

There has been little work on the specificity and mechanisms underlying the appetite of potassium (K + ) deprived rats, and there are conflicting results. To investigate the contribution of oral factors to changes in intake induced by K + deficiency, we conducted two experiments using 20-s "brief access" tests. In Experiment 1, K + -deprived rats licked less for water than did replete rats. After adjusting for this difference, K + -deprived rats exhibited increased licking for 100 mM CaCl 2 , 100 mM MgCl 2 , and 100 mM FeCl 2 compared with K + -replete rats. In Experiment 2, which used larger rats, the K + -deprived and replete groups licked equally for water, 500 mM Na·Gluconate, 350 mM KCl, 500 mM KHCO 3 , and 1 mM quinine·HCl, but the K + -deprived rats licked more for 500 mM KCl, 500 mM CsCl, and 500 mM NaCl than did the replete rats. Licking was unaffected by addition to NaCl of 200 μM amiloride, an epithelial Na + channel (ENaC) blocker, or 100 μM ruthenium red, a vanilloid receptor 1 (VR-1) antagonist, or by addition to KCl of 50 μM 4-aminopyridine, a K + channel blocker. These findings suggest that K + -deprivation produces a non-specific appetite that is guided by oral factors. We found no evidence that this response was mediated by ENaC, VR-1, or K + channels in taste receptor cells.

Encapsulated sodium supplementation of 4weeks does not alter salt taste preferences in a controlled low sodium and low potassium diet

“…In rodents, both sodium (Ferreyra & Chiaraviglio, 1977) and potassium deprivation (Adam & Dawborn, 1972;Tordoff, 1992;Zucker, 1965) increase sodium appetite. However, a more recent study suggests that potassium deprived rats do not have a specific appetite for sodium, but a more general attraction to various minerals measured by licking rates of different kinds of chloride salts (Guenthner, McCaughey, Tordoff, & Baird, 2008). In contrast to animal studies, low levels of both potassium and sodium did not show any effect on human salt taste in the present study.…”

Development and evaluation of an oral fast disintegrating anti-allergic film using hot-melt extrusion technology

“…The rodent brief-access taste aversion (BATA) model is one of the popular approaches used for taste evaluation [39–45]. In this model, rodents such as mice or rats, are mildly water-deprived and then put into as “lickometer” which records the number of “licks” that the rodents make to different concentrations of the compound under test samples presented in several sipper tubes [46].…”

Anion size modulates salt taste in rats

“…In fact, it has been shown that TRPV1 knockout and wild-type mice have equal detection thresholds for NaCl (Ruiz et al 2006;Treesukosol et al 2007). Furthermore, it has been shown that the increased licking responses to NaCl solutions by potassium-deprived rats were unaffected by TRPV1 antagonists, SB-366791 and ruthenium red (Guenthner et al 2008). Behaviorally, amiloride is an excellent antagonist because it is tasteless to rats (Markison and Spector 1995), while TRPV1 antagonists like CPC taste bitter to rats (St. John and Hallagan 2005), and SB-366791, a lipophilic molecule, must be dissolved in DMSO.…”