Bile salts are effective taste stimuli in channel catfish.

Bile salts are known olfactory stimuli for teleosts, but only a single report has indicated that the taste system of a fish was sensitive to this class of stimuli. Here, gustatory responses of the channel catfish, Ictalurus punctatus, to four bile salts that included taurine-, glycine- and non-conjugated compounds along with three stimulatory amino acids as a comparison were investigated using extracellular electrophysiological techniques. Integrated multiunit responses were obtained from the branch of the facial nerve innervating taste buds on the maxillary barbel. Bile salts were shown to be highly effective facial taste stimuli, with estimated electrophysiological thresholds for three of the four tested bile salts of approximately 10(-11) mol l(-1) to 10(-10) mol l(-1), slightly lower by 1-2 log units than those to amino acids in the same species. Although the sensitivity of the facial taste system of the channel catfish to bile salts is high, the relative magnitude of the response to suprathreshold concentrations of bile salts was significantly less than that to amino acids. Multiunit cross-adaptation experiments indicate that bile salts and amino acids bind to relatively independent receptor sites; however, nerve-twig data and single-fiber recordings suggest that both independent and shared neural pathways exist for the transmission of bile salt and amino acid information to the primary gustatory nucleus of the medulla.