Integration of retronasal olfaction and taste: Volatile-enhanced Sweetness

描述（由申请人提供）：该项目研究了一种创造甜味的新方法，该方法有可能减少糖和人工甜味剂的消耗;这种新的甜味是由气味剂创造的。气味剂（挥发物）通过两种途径到达嗅觉受体。嗅闻将来自外界的气味带入鼻子，在那里它们刺激位于鼻腔顶部的嗅觉受体（鼻侧嗅觉）。当咀嚼和吞咽散发气味的食物时，这些气味被迫从上颚后面进入鼻腔（鼻后嗅觉）。大脑整合味觉和鼻后嗅觉来创造味道。这种整合具有不同寻常的特性;在某些情况下，味觉和鼻后嗅觉可以相互加强。食品工业早就知道味道可以增强挥发物产生的感觉（例如，加到葡萄汁中的糖增强了葡萄的感觉）。最近，化学传感科学家已经了解到相反的情况：挥发物可以增强味道，不同的挥发物增强不同的味道（例如，草莓 挥发物增强甜味;酱料挥发物增强咸味）。这项研究的长期目标是了解挥发物增强味觉的感知规则。挥发物增强的味道最初被认为是相对罕见的，但对西红柿和草莓数据的数学分析确定了30多种独立于糖含量的挥发物。有趣的是，园艺专家已经观察到，番茄泥“掺有”某些挥发物尝起来更甜;然而，这种观察基本上是化学传感器社区看不到的。本项目继续整合园艺和化学传感科学，以量化挥发性增强的甜味。收获后挥发物的损失是一个严重的商业问题，这导致了与挥发物增强甜度相关的丰富的收获后科学。改变挥发物，同时保持其他成分相对恒定，提供了实验技术来量化由于挥发物而产生的甜味强度。在本项目中将使用三种挥发性改变的来源：（1）番茄突变产生已知的挥发性损失，（2）冷却番茄已知减少挥发物，（3）暴露于特定波长的光改变挥发物（有时增加挥发物）。在食品科学中，甜味通常通过只能按甜味顺序放置项目的量表来量化，但本项目中使用的甜味量表将允许比较项目之间的甜味强度以及不同群体对甜味的感知（例如，妇女和男子）。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project studies a novel way to create sweet taste that has the potential to reduce consumption of sugars and artificial sweeteners; this novel sweetness is created from odorants. Odorants (volatiles) reach the olfactory receptors by two routes. Sniffing brings odorants from the outside world into the nose where they stimulate the olfactory receptors at the top of the nasal space (orthonasal olfaction). When foods emitting odorants are chewed and swallowed, those odorants are forced up behind the palate and into the nasal space from the back (retronasal olfaction). The brain integrates taste and retronasal olfaction to create flavor. This integration has unusual properties; under some conditions, taste and retronasal olfaction can intensify one another. The food industry has long known that tastes could intensify sensations produced by volatiles (e.g., sugar added to grape juice intensifies the sensation of grape). More recently, chemosensory scientists have learned about the reverse: volatiles can intensity taste, and different volatiles intensify different tastes (e.g., strawberry volatiles enhance sweet; soy sauce volatiles enhance salty). The long-term goal of the proposed research is to understand the perceptual rules underlying volatile-enhanced taste. Volatile-enhanced taste was originally thought to be relatively uncommon, but mathematical analyses of data from tomatoes and strawberries identified more than 30 volatiles contributing to sweetness independently of sugar content. Interestingly, experts in horticulture had already observed that tomato puree "spiked" with certain volatiles tasted sweeter; however, this observation was essentially invisible to the chemosensory community. The present project continues to integrate horticultural and chemosensory science in order to quantify volatile- enhanced sweet. Loss of volatiles after harvest is a serious commercial problem that has led to a rich body of post-harvest science relevant to volatile-enhanced sweetness. Altering volatiles while holding other constituents relatively constant offers experimental techniques to quantify the intensity of the sweetness due to the volatiles. Three sources of volatile alteration will be used in the present project: (1) tomato mutations produce known volatile losses, (2) chilling tomatoes is known to reduce volatiles and (3) exposure to lights of particular wavelengths alters volatiles (sometimes increasing them). Sweetness is typically quantified in food science by scales that can only place items in order of sweetness but the sweetness scales used in this project will allow comparisons of sweetness intensity among items and also comparisons of sweetness perception by different groups (e.g., women and men).