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Background  Umami and sweet tastes are two important basic taste perceptions that allow animals to recognize diets with nutritious carbohydrates and proteins, respectively. Until recently, analyses of umami and sweet taste were performed on various domestic and wild animals. While most of these studies focused on the pseudogenization of taste genes, which occur mostly in carnivores and species with absolute feeding specialization, omnivores and herbivores were more or less neglected. Catarrhine primates are a group of herbivorous animals (feeding mostly on plants) with significant divergence in dietary preference, especially the specialized folivorous Colobinae. Here, we conducted the most comprehensive investigation to date of selection pressure on sweet and umami taste genes ( TAS1Rs ) in catarrhine primates to test whether specific adaptive evolution occurred during their diversification, in association with particular plant diets.    Results  We documented significant relaxation of selective constraints on sweet taste gene  TAS1R2  in the ancestral branch of Colobinae, which might correlate with their unique ingestion and digestion of leaves. Additionally, we identified positive selection acting on Cercopithecidae lineages for the umami taste gene  TAS1R1 , on the Cercopithecinae and extant Colobinae and Hylobatidae lineages for  TAS1R2 , and on  Macaca  lineages for  TAS1R3 . Our research further identified several site mutations in Cercopithecidae, Colobinae and  Pygathrix , which were detected by previous studies altering the sensitivity of receptors. The positively selected sites were located mostly on the extra-cellular region of TAS1Rs. Among these positively selected sites, two vital sites for TAS1R1 and four vital sites for TAS1R2 in extra-cellular region were identified as being responsible for the binding of certain sweet and umami taste molecules through molecular modelling and docking.    Conclusions  Our results suggest that episodic and differentiated adaptive evolution of  TAS1Rs  pervasively occurred in catarrhine primates, most concentrated upon the extra-cellular region of TAS1Rs.    Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12983-014-0079-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

frontiers in zoology

Differentiated adaptive evolution, episodic relaxation of selective constraints, and pseudogenization of umami and sweet taste genes TAS1Rs in catarrhine primates