4 - From fermentation to white biotechnology: how microbial catalysts generate flavours

Abstract

Publisher Summary Volatile flavors are long-range chemical signals. Fruits, vegetables, and other plants produce them to attract pollinators, birds, or other animals, or to repel microbial and animal invaders trying to feed on them. The recent interest in the functional properties of food constituents has shown that many flavor compounds possess additional bioactivities, bipolar terpenes of essential oil plants and some carbonyls are anti-microbial, anti-fungal, anti-inflammatory or even anti-viral; some volatile phenols are strong antioxidants; some volatile aldehydes inhibit the production of nitric oxide, a factor contributing to the regulation of blood pressure. The biochemical precursors of flavors, mainly fatty and amino acids, isoprene units, and phenylpropanoids, are ubiquitous in nature. Micro-organisms modify these substrates along efficient and selective enzymatically accelerated pathways, similar to those operating in plant cells that, in the form of intact tissues, are called “food.”