Peptide interactions with taste receptors: overlap in taste receptor specificity.

Two hitherto unrelated areas of taste appear to provide an important insight into a class of taste receptor sites. A region of the sweet protein monellin is similar to a savory tasting beef octapeptide, and this peptide region could represent an overlap in the specificity of binding to a common peptide taste receptor site. Such an overlap in binding specificity explains the low but significant level of sweetness observed with savory tasting stimuli.