Researchers from the Monell Center and Tokyo University of Agriculture have used a novel molecular method to identify chemical compounds from common foods that activate human bitter taste receptors.
The findings, published in the journal Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, provide a practical means to manipulate food flavor in general and bitter taste in particular.
“Identification of bitter taste compounds and their corresponding receptors opens doors to screening for specific bitter receptor inhibitors,” said senior author Liquan Huang, PhD, a molecular biologist at Monell. “Such inhibitors can be used to suppress unpleasantness and thereby increase palatability and acceptance of health-promoting bitter foods, such as green vegetables or soy products.”
While a little bitterness is often considered a desirable component of a food’s flavor, extensive bitterness can limit food acceptance.
About 25 different human bitter receptors have been identified from human genome sequences. However, only a few of these bitter receptors can be activated by known chemical compounds. The remainders are ‘orphan receptors,’ meaning that the compounds that bind to and activate them have not been identified. Consequently, it is unclear how these orphan receptors contribute to bitter taste perception.
Huang and his collaborators ‘deorphanized’ several bitter receptors by demonstrating that peptides from fermented foods can specifically stimulate human bitter taste receptors expressed in a cell culture system.
Fermented foods, such as cheese or miso, are characterized by bitter off-tastes. These foods also contain abundant quantities of peptides, which are short chains of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
The results reveal the molecular identities of chemical food components responsible for the bitterness of fermented foods and demonstrate that bitter-tasting peptides are detected by human bitter receptors in an analogous manner to other bitter compounds.
“Information on how food constituents interact with receptors is needed to design and identify inhibitors and enhancers that can be targeted towards specific bitter compounds,” says Huang. “Our findings may help make health-promoting bitter foods such as broccoli more palatable for children and adults.”
Leslie Stein | EurekAlert!
"Make two out of one" - Division of Artificial Cells
19.02.2020 | Max-Planck-Institut für Kolloid- und Grenzflächenforschung
Sweet beaks: What Galapagos finches and marine bacteria have in common
19.02.2020 | Max-Planck-Institut für Marine Mikrobiologie
The operational speed of semiconductors in various electronic and optoelectronic devices is limited to several gigahertz (a billion oscillations per second). This constrains the upper limit of the operational speed of computing. Now researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg, Germany, and the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay have explained how these processes can be sped up through the use of light waves and defected solid materials.
Light waves perform several hundred trillion oscillations per second. Hence, it is natural to envision employing light oscillations to drive the electronic...
Most natural and artificial surfaces are rough: metals and even glasses that appear smooth to the naked eye can look like jagged mountain ranges under the microscope. There is currently no uniform theory about the origin of this roughness despite it being observed on all scales, from the atomic to the tectonic. Scientists suspect that the rough surface is formed by irreversible plastic deformation that occurs in many processes of mechanical machining of components such as milling.
Prof. Dr. Lars Pastewka from the Simulation group at the Department of Microsystems Engineering at the University of Freiburg and his team have simulated such...
Investigation of the temperature dependence of the skyrmion Hall effect reveals further insights into possible new data storage devices
The joint research project of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that had previously demonstrated...
Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, recently completed a 5-year research project looking at how to make fibre optic communications systems more energy efficient. Among their proposals are smart, error-correcting data chip circuits, which they refined to be 10 times less energy consumptive. The project has yielded several scientific articles, in publications including Nature Communications.
Streaming films and music, scrolling through social media, and using cloud-based storage services are everyday activities now.
After helping develop a new approach for organic synthesis -- carbon-hydrogen functionalization -- scientists at Emory University are now showing how this approach may apply to drug discovery. Nature Catalysis published their most recent work -- a streamlined process for making a three-dimensional scaffold of keen interest to the pharmaceutical industry.
"Our tools open up whole new chemical space for potential drug targets," says Huw Davies, Emory professor of organic chemistry and senior author of the paper.
12.02.2020 | Event News
16.01.2020 | Event News
15.01.2020 | Event News
19.02.2020 | Life Sciences
19.02.2020 | Information Technology
19.02.2020 | Power and Electrical Engineering