Food texture, along with taste and odour, is an important factor in determining food flavour. However, the physiological properties of oral texture perception require greater examination and definition. Here we explore recent trends and perspectives related to mouthfeel and its relevance in food flavour perception, with an emphasis on the biophysical point of view and methods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAbout half of the world's population is infected with the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. For colonization, the bacterium neutralizes the low gastric pH and recruits immune cells to the stomach. The immune cells secrete cytokines, i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEating satiating, protein-rich foods is one of the key aspects of modern diet, although a bitter off-taste often limits the application of some proteins and protein hydrolysates, especially in processed foods. Previous studies of our group demonstrated that bitter-tasting food constituents, such as caffeine, stimulate mechanisms of gastric acid secretion as a signal of gastric satiation and a key process of gastric protein digestion activation of bitter taste receptors (TAS2Rs). Here, we tried to elucidate whether dietary non-bitter-tasting casein is intra-gastrically degraded into bitter peptides that stimulate mechanisms of gastric acid secretion in physiologically achievable concentrations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAiming at the identification of the key bitter peptides in fermented foods, a new approach, coined "sensoproteomics", was developed and applied to fresh cheese samples differing in bitter taste intensity. By means of MPLC fractionation of the water-soluble cheese extracts in combination with taste dilution analysis, complex fractions with intense bitter taste were located and then screened by UPLC-MS/MS for the entire repertoire of ∼1600 candidate peptides, extracted from a literature meta-analysis on dairy products, by using a total of 120 selected reaction monitoring methods computed in silico. A total of 340 out of the 1600 peptides were found in the cheese samples, among which 17 peptides were identified as candidate bitter peptides by considering only peptides that were located in the bitter-tasting MPLC fractions (signal-to-noise ratio: ≥10) with a fold-change of ≥3 when comparing the less bitter to the more bitter cheese sample and that were validated by comparison with the synthetic reference peptides.
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