ABSTRACT
Two commonly used tastants, sucrose and sodium chloride, were applied to the tongue surface of rats while recording was made from their gustatory peripheral nerve, chorda tympani [CT]. This multiple unit recording was performed in the presence of different doses of clonidine, an antihypertensive drug. Clonidine, in low doses [0.15, 0.25 mg/kg, intraperitoneally] caused a significant decrease in the relative integrated neural responses of the rats' CT to NaCl [0.1 M] and sucrose [0.5 M] as compared to the reference solution [NH4Cl] [p<0.05]. In these doses clonidine did not act selectively in response to these special tastants, but in higher doses [0.5 mg/kg], it attenuated the nerve response to sucrose, while no effect was elicited on the response to NaCl