Perceived intensities of sweetness and bitterness are correlated with one another and each is influenced by genetics. The extent to which these correlations share common genetic variation, however, remains unclear. In a mainly adolescent sample (n = 1901, mean age 16.2 years), including 243 monozygotic (MZ) and 452 dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs, we estimated the covariance among the perceived inten...

BACKGROUND sip feeds are oral nutritional supplements (ONSs) that are commonly prescribed to malnourished patients to improve their nutritional and clinical status. However, ONSs are poorly consumed and frequently wasted, with sweetness being identified as one of the factors leading to patients' dislike of ONSs. OBJECTIVES to investigate if age affects sweetness thresholds and if this impacts...

A lactose-hydrolyzed milk with low sweetness was developed using nanofiltration. Raw milk was treated with 0.03% β-galactosidase at 4°C for 24 h to hydrolyze lactose partially. The resultant lactose-hydrolyzed milk containing 0.43% lactose was then concentrated using a nanofiltration membrane to reach concentration factor of 2.13. The concentration factors and coefficients of retention of milk ...

Sweetness is a traditional sensory indicator used to evaluate the quality of the popular Chinese herb Radix Astragali (RA). RA roots with strong sweetness are considered to be of good quality. However, neither a thorough analysis of the component(s) contributing to RA sweetness, nor a scientific investigation of the reliability of this indicator has been conducted to date. In this study, seven ...

To clarify the structural basis for the sweetness of thaumatin I, lysine-modified derivatives and carboxyl-group-modified derivatives were prepared by chemical modification followed by chromatographic purification. The sweetness of derivatives was evaluated by sensory analysis. Phosphopyridoxylation of lysine residues Lys78, Lys97, Lys106, Lys137 and Lys187 markedly reduced sweetness. The inten...

Lysozyme is one of the sweet-tasting proteins. To clarify the structure-sweetness relationship and the basicity-sweetness relationship in lysozyme, we have generated lysozyme mutants with Pichia systems. Alanine substitution of lysine residues demonstrated that two out of six lysine residues, Lys13 and Lys96, are required for lysozyme sweetness, while the remaining four lysine residues do not p...

The impact of olfactory perception on sweetness was explored in a model solution using odorants at subthreshold concentrations. First, the impact of 6 odorants, previously described in the literature as congruent with sweetness, was investigated at suprathreshold level in a sucrose solution. Ethyl butyrate and maltol were selected as they had the highest and the lowest sweetness-enhancing prope...

Sweetness is one of the main drivers of consumer preference, and thus is given high priority in apple breeding programmes. Due to the complexity of sweetness evaluation, soluble solid content (SSC) is commonly used as an estimation of this trait. Nevertheless, it has been demonstrated that SSC and sweet taste are poorly correlated. Though individual sugar content may vary greatly between and wi...