Significance The maintenance of taste sensory organs (taste buds) in the tongue has been known for 140 years to depend on sensory innervation from distant neurons by an unknown mechanism. We find that maintenance and regeneration of taste receptor cells (TRCs) within taste buds requires neuronal delivery of the Sonic hedgehog (Shh) protein signal, thus explaining loss of taste sensation associated with Hedgehog pathway antagonism in patients and illustrating the principle that spatial patterning of TRC regeneration is specified by the projection pattern of Shh-expressing sensory neurons. We also find that pharmacologic Hedgehog pathway activation accelerates TRC recovery, suggesting a means to ameliorate the loss of taste sensation and appetite and the associated delay in recovery in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.
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Lu et al. (2017) studied this question.
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