Insensitivity to the bitter taste of chloramphenicol: an autosomal recessive trait

Sensitivity to the bitter taste of chloramphenicol was studied in 860 students, 620 males and 240 females. About 8.6% of them were insensitive to this bitter taste. Familial lineage studies were carried out on a subset of these students, and the results suggested that the sensitivity or insensitivity was controlled by a pair of autosomal Mendelian genes, with the sensitive gene being dominant over the insensitive.