Mice engineered to lack sweet receptors drink equally from bottles containing sugar or water.

“Now, if, for instance, you take an animal which completely lacks sweet receptors, and you can do this through some molecular genetic tools and gymnastics in the laboratory, we call these knockout mice, where you can knock out a particular receptor for sweet taste, you can confirm that there's no perception of sweet things or at least no preference for sweet things in those animals.”

“So this mice no longer have in their oral cavity, any sensors that can detect sweetness, be that sugar molecule be an artificial sweetener, be anything else that tastes sweet. And if you give this mice an option between sweet versus water, sugar versus water, artificial sweetener versus water, it will drink equally well from both because he cannot tell them apart because it doesn't have the receptors for sweet.”

“So in essence, these animals will be unable to taste sweet. And if you give an animal option of a bottle containing sweet and we're going to put either sugar or an artificial sweetener. All right, they both are sweet. They have slightly different tastes, but that's simply because artificial sweeteners have some off tastes. But as far as the sweet receptor is concerned, they both activate the same receptor, trigger the same signal. And if you give an animal option of a bottle containing sugar or a sweetener versus water, this animal will drink 10 to one from the bottle containing sweet. That's the taste system. it animal goes samples each one leaks a couple of leaks and then said uhuh that's the one I want because it's aitive and because I love it. Now we're going to take the mice and we're going to genetically engineer it to remove the sweet receptors. So these mice no longer have in their oral cavity any sensors that can detect sweetness, be that sugar molecule, be an artificial sweetener, be anything else that tastes sweet. And if you give this mice an option between sweet versus water, it will drink equally well from both because he cannot tell them apart because it doesn't have the receptors for sweet. So that sweet bottle tastes just like water.”