Abstract
Abstract The search for new sweeteners technologies has increased substantially in the past decades as the number of diseases related to the excessive consumption of sugar became a public health concern. Low carbohydrates diets help to reduce ingested calories and to maintain a healthy weight. Most natural and synthetic high potency non-caloric sweeteners, known to date, show limitations in taste quality and are generally used in combination due to their complementary flavor characteristics and physicochemical properties in order to minimize undesirable features. The challenge of the food manufacturers is to develop low or calorie-free products without compromising the real taste of sugar expected by consumers. With the discovery of the genes coding for the sweet taste receptor in humans, entirely new flavor ingredients were identified, which are tasteless on their own, but potentially enhance the taste of sugar. These small molecules known as positive allosteric modulators (PAMs) could be more effective than other reported taste enhancers at reducing calories in consumer products. PAMs could represent a breakthrough in the field of flavor development after the increase in the knowledge of safety profile in combination with sucrose in humans.
Highlights
Since the end of the twentieth century, obesity has been one of the greatest public health concerns worldwide (Disse et al, 2010), with consequences beyond esthetic issues, as it is considered a risk factor for many different diseases (Fujiwara et al, 2012; Ribeiro & Santos, 2013), such as cardiac conditions, hypertension and diabetes
The use of high-throughput screening technologies and classical discovery approaches has enabled the discovery of novel sweeteners as well as sweet taste enhancers, known as positive allosteric modulators (PAMs), which are absolutely tasteless at the intended usage levels, but potentially enhance the activity of agonists of the sweet taste receptors and, sweetness perception
The sweet taste enhancers are most likely to bind to T1R2 subunit adjacent to the flytrap opening, linked to a transmembrane domain (TDM) via a short cysteine-rich domain (CRD), helping it to stay closed once the sweetener has struck (Nelson et al, 2001; Zhao et al, 2003)
Summary
Since the end of the twentieth century, obesity has been one of the greatest public health concerns worldwide (Disse et al, 2010), with consequences beyond esthetic issues, as it is considered a risk factor for many different diseases (Fujiwara et al, 2012; Ribeiro & Santos, 2013), such as cardiac conditions, hypertension and diabetes. To limit the prevalence of diseases related to the excessive consumption of sugar, researchers have worked on the isolation of naturally occurring compounds and development of synthetic sweeteners. These sweeteners are able to replace sugar totally or partially, but are rarely as satisfying as the full sugar alternative because they fail to trigger physiological satiety mechanisms (Raben et al, 2002; Swithers et al, 2010). Due to the ongoing demand for alternative sugar substitutes, there has been a large research effort over the past several decades aimed at identifying the human genes coding for the sweet taste receptor. We describe the advantages and possible applications of sweet taste enhancers in the food industry
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