ArticleScientific reports2020
Impact of alkaloids in food consumption, metabolism and survival in a blood-sucking insect.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 50 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Medicinal Plants as Biopesticides Against Pests and Diseases of Maize (Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Recent Insights into the Research of (Bio)Active Additives for Advanced Polymer Materials.Polymers · 2025Review
- Iridoids fromMolecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Decoding pilocarpine biosynthesis and its roles in Pilocarpus microphyllus through a comparative transcriptomics approach.BMC plant biology · 2025Article
- Mosquitoes do not Like Bitter.Journal of chemical ecology · 2024Article
- The pharyngeal taste organ of a blood-feeding insect functions in food recognition.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Acid and Alkali Taste Sensation.Metabolites · 2023Review
- Spent Coffee Grounds and Novaluron Are Toxic toInsects · 2023Article
- Gustation in insects: taste qualities and types of evidence used to show taste function of specific body parts.Journal of insect science (Online) · 2023Article
- Article
- Chemical components change along the ontogeny of a bat fruit (Neolamarckia cadamba) with ripening asynchrony in favour of its fruit selection and seed dispersal.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The sense of taste provides information about the "good" or "bad" quality of a food source, which may be potentially nutritious or toxic. Most alkaloids taste bitter to humans, and because bitter taste is synonymous of noxious food, they are generally rejected. This response may be due to an innate low palatability or due to a malaise that occurs after food ingestion, which could even lead to death. We investigated in the kissing bug Rhodnius prolixus, whether alkaloids such as quinine, caffeine and theophylline, are merely distasteful, or if anti-appetitive responses are caused by a post-ingestion physiological effect, or both of these options. Although anti-appetitive responses were observed for the three alkaloids, only caffeine and theophylline affect metabolic and respiratory parameters that reflected an underlying physiological stress following their ingestion. Furthermore, caffeine caused the highest mortality. In contrast, quinine appears to be a merely unpalatable compound. The sense of taste helps insects to avoid making wrong feeding decisions, such as the intake of bitter/toxic foods, and thus avoid potentially harmful effects on health, a mechanism preserved in obligate hematophagous insects.
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