Background and Aims:  Italian wine… Swiss chocolate… French cuisine… much of our daily life quality is depending on the proper function of our sensory system. Although aided by smell and visual inspection, the final recognition and evaluation of food relies on chemoreceptive events in the oral space. This sensing system gives us the possibility to detect those foods containing essential nutrients such as salty tasting minerals, sweet tasting carbohydrates, and sweet or umami-tasting amino acids, but also to detect aversive bitter tasting compounds in order to warn about the potential ingestion of toxic or harmful chemicals such as, e.g. strychnine, amygdaline or nicotine. This functional duality of taste is reflected in a great diversity of different compounds that are capable of activating the gustatory system in the mouth.
The lingual flavor sensation during food delight is a complex convergence of at least two sensory modalities; (i) the gustatory taste sensation, i.e. the perception of the basic tastes modalities sour, sweet, salty, bitter as well as umami by activation of taste bud sensory cells, and (ii) lingual somatosensory sensitivity resulting from temperature and tactile stimulation as well as chemical activation of chemosensory receptors on the perigemmal fibers. Although enormous number of investigations have been done in the past and in the present to identify what is making the foods taste that good, the knowledge on the key molecules driving liking or disliking of our food products is still far away from being comprehensive. Therefore, it is the aim of our group to identify these key compounds on a molecular level and to understand the mechanisms of biological functioning.
Examples: such as the bitter off-taste compound falcarindiol in carrot products (A in Figure), the multimodal taste enhancer (+)-S-alapyridaine in beef bouillon (B in Figure), the astringent N-caffeoyl-L-aspartic acid in roasted cocoa nibs (C in Figure), a kokumi-like taste modifier (-)-S-morelid in morel mushrooms (D in Figure), the cooling 3-methyl-2-pyrrolidinylcyclopentenone in roasted malt (E in Figure), the velvety astringent and mouth-drying quercetin-3-O-rutinoside in green and black tea (F in Figure) etc.

  • Sensory-directed fractionation of foods and screening for most potent taste-active compounds
  • Isolation, purification and structure determination by means of LC-MS/MS, 1D/2D-NMR spectroscopy, and chemical synthesis
  • Quantification of key taste compounds by means of stable isotope dilution assays (SIDA) and calculation of dose-over-threshold (DoT)-factors
  • Chemical characterization of ligands for taste receptor deorphanization
  • Functional characterization of taste compounds by means of human psychophysical experiment
   

Figure. A selection of sensory active compounds in foods.