An entire industry has been set up around finding chemicals that can mask the sour taste of certain foods and chemicals.
Hiroaki Matsunami and colleagues from Duke University Medical Center are trying to find the next blockbusting sweetner - based on a protein called miraculin. It is found in the pulp of the miracle berry – the fruit of an evergreen shrub native to West Africa.
Miraculin itself has no distinct taste but, when exposed to the protein, the human tongue suddenly perceives sour foods as sweet.
The Duke team has developed a general test to find similar molecules by isolating the proteins in human taste receptors and screening for molecules that bind with them.
In this way, they hope to find new generations of chemicals that can modify taste. These could be used as a more effective aid to weight loss or as a sugar replacement for people with diabetes.
Read the full miracle sweetener proteins patent application.
Justin Mullins, New Scientist consultant
Archive for the ‘food’ Category
Miracle sweeteners
Thursday, April 10th, 2008DIY cheese puffs
Thursday, January 10th, 2008
Foods like popcorn that expand in the microwave have become popular in recent years because they are quick to prepare and because of the fun shapes and textures that can be made at home.But making cheese puffs is more difficult. They tend to expand by only a small amount and the synthetic mixture from which they are made is high in fat and low in fibre, making it far from healthy.
But Dolores O'Riordan, a food scientist at University College Dublin in Ireland and colleagues aims to change this.
The team hopes to exploit the discovery that replacing the fat with starch in the synthetic cheesy mixture creates a low-fat, high-fibre snack, which expands by up to 60% when heated in a microwave for 60 seconds. That would allow people to make crispy cheese puffs at home, just like microwave popcorn.
Read the full cheese puff patent application.
Justin Mullins, New Scientist consultant
Personal food analyser
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
Ever wondered whether what you are eating is exactly what is described on the menu? Or whether the alcohol content of the brew at your local bar is higher or lower than stated? Today there is no easy way to tell, but one day you may own a gadget not unlike a Star Trek tricorder that can find out.Analysing food has always been a complex business. One of the most common methods is spectroscopy, in which the sample is zapped with light and the reflected wavelengths measured and compared with a database of records from known foods and liquids.
But this is an expensive process, largely because of the high-quality optical equipment required and so only larger food companies have been able to afford to carry out these kinds of tests regularly.
But the consumer electronics company Philips says that lab-on-a-chip technology in which the components are shrunk to fit on a single chip should soon make this equipment much cheaper.
The company has come up with a design for a tiny analyser that small foods companies could afford and suggests that personal analysers that consumers could carry with them to bars and restaurants may not be far off.
Read the full personal food analyser patent application.
Justin Mullins
Grape quality prediction
Friday, November 16th, 2007
One measure of the quality of a red grape for wine production is the concentration of a pigment called anthocyanin that it contains. In fact, anthocyanin concentration could be used as a way of paying grape growers not just for the quantity of grapes they supply but their quality too.
But measuring anthocyanin concentration in grapes as they are picked is not feasible, so predictions of grape quality have to be made based on previous growth and this can be inaccurate, particularly at the beginning of a new season when grapes may have a different characteristic to last season's.
So the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) - the Australian government's research branch - has developed a way of predicting a vine's future anthocyanin production using a neural network trained on data from previous values. The technique works better than other methods, says CSIRO. But whether it works well enough to persuade grape growers to use it as a way of fixing payments is another question entirely.
Read the the full grape quality prediction patent application.
Justin Mullins.
But measuring anthocyanin concentration in grapes as they are picked is not feasible, so predictions of grape quality have to be made based on previous growth and this can be inaccurate, particularly at the beginning of a new season when grapes may have a different characteristic to last season's.
So the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) - the Australian government's research branch - has developed a way of predicting a vine's future anthocyanin production using a neural network trained on data from previous values. The technique works better than other methods, says CSIRO. But whether it works well enough to persuade grape growers to use it as a way of fixing payments is another question entirely.
Read the the full grape quality prediction patent application.
Justin Mullins.
Better marbling in beef
Thursday, November 15th, 2007
Beef is graded according to the amount of marbling it has--the amount of fat there is within the muscle itself. Well-marbled beef is highly sought after because it improves the taste and juiciness of the meat. But determining which cattle are likely to produce good marbling and selectively breeding them is a time consuming process, not least because the breeding process takes years.
Now Zhihua Jiang of Washington state University and colleagues say that a gene that codes for corticotrophin-releasing hormone seems to control the distribution of fat within muscle in cattle.
The team has identified a number of polymorphisms of the gene that determine the degree of marbling and says that choosing the cattle with the best beef is simply a matter of looking for appropriate polymorphisms with a blood test. That should dramatically simplify and speed up the process of breeding better beef cattle.
Read the full beef marbling patent application
Justin Mullins, New Scientist contributor
Now Zhihua Jiang of Washington state University and colleagues say that a gene that codes for corticotrophin-releasing hormone seems to control the distribution of fat within muscle in cattle.
The team has identified a number of polymorphisms of the gene that determine the degree of marbling and says that choosing the cattle with the best beef is simply a matter of looking for appropriate polymorphisms with a blood test. That should dramatically simplify and speed up the process of breeding better beef cattle.
Read the full beef marbling patent application
Justin Mullins, New Scientist contributor