Credit: RDNE Stock project from Pexels Have you ever wondered why freshly brewed coffee smells so delicious, but tastes bitter? New research from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine has revealed the molecular details responsible for the detection of this bitter taste. Uncovering how a coffee receptor works "Before this study, we did not know how coffee bitterness is initiated at the molecular level, because there was no three-dimensional structure showing how the bitter taste receptor TAS2R43 recognizes bitter tastants," said Yoojoong Kim, Ph.D., a post-doctoral research associate in the laboratory of Bryan Roth, MD, Ph.D., and first author of the article, which was published recently in Nature Structure & Molecular Biology . "In this work, we solved the structures of TAS2R43 bound to bitter compounds and showed, in molecular detail, how this receptor detects bitter molecules.…