Abstract
THE mechanism of taste perception has been approached through work on the relationships between chemical properties of taste stimuli and their resultant taste responses. Ferguson and Lawrence1,2 reported that the D-configurations of leucine, iso-leucine, valine, histidine, tryptophan and asparagine were sweet, whereas the L-forms were not. These authors observed that isomaltose (6-α-D-glucopyranosyl-D-glucose) was sweet, but its anomer, gentiobiose (6 - β - D - glucopyranosyl - D - glucose), was bitter. Cameron3,4 found that a freshly prepared solution of 10 per cent α-D-glucose was definitely sweeter than a 16-hr.-old 10 per cent solution. The magnitude of the response (fourteen evaluations) suggested that the fresh solution had a sweetness equal to or more than that of a 10.5 per cent equilibrium solution.
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References
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PANGBORN, R., GEE, S. Relative Sweetness of α- and β-Forms of Selected Sugars. Nature 191, 810–811 (1961). https://doi.org/10.1038/191810a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/191810a0
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