The Associated Press has an article on the genetics of taste and its relevance in everyday life. I've posted on the genetics of taste in the past, it's an interesting topic. Basically, you have three phenotypes:
Super-taster
Taster
Non-taster
Until recently the "super-taster" category was unknown, the crude assays (e.g., tasting PTC doped paper) only distinguished between tasters and non-tasters. The inheritance pattern would have suggested a recessive pattern for the non-tasters, but the super-taster category suggests that we are simply seeing a more additive process where two "on" alleles results in greater sensitivity. Outside of Africa there are only two alleles, and their deep time coexistence suggests that neither is being driven by positive selection to extinguish the other. Here's a recent paper on the topic:
The ability or inability to taste the compound phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) is a classic inherited trait in humans and has been the subject of ...
