Nowadays, the high incidence of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hyperlipidemia and other diseases are more or less related to excessive sucrose intake.

Can we find a high sweetness, low calorie, or non nutritive alternative to sucrose? For a long time, there has been great interest in finding high sweetness, low calorie, or non nutritive alternatives to sucrose - especially safe, calorie free, non nutritive natural and efficient sweeteners - which is an important field of research for scientists around the world.

The Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently said that it had made a series of important new progress in the research of discovering natural and efficient sweet molecules, and had successively published papers in the mainstream journal of the field, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, and obtained two national authorized patents.

In the Ethnobotany Team of Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Du Zhizhi's research team found a variety of sweet plants for different ethnic groups to eat and use for medicine through the ethnobotany field survey of characteristic edible and medicinal plants in major ethnic minority areas in Yunnan, and combined with taste sensory evaluation.

They conducted in-depth research on the relevant components of two sweet tasting plants among them.

The winged fruit vine of the Luo Mo family belongs to the winged fruit vine genus, which is a plant used for food and medicine by ethnic minorities such as the Yao people in Yunnan. It is locally known as Tu Gan Cao or Da Pai Jie Sheng. The fruit skin can be used to pickle pickled vegetables, while the roots have anti-inflammatory, lung moistening, and cough relieving effects. The fruit skin and roots have a sweet taste, but there have been no reports on the sweet ingredients it contains.

By tracking and isolating taste activity, researchers discovered 10 new sweet steroidal glycosides from the peel of the samara vine.

When using a human sensory evaluation model to evaluate these new compounds, it was found that their sweetness ranged from 50 to 400 times that of sucrose.

In addition, they also isolated and identified 12 new compounds from the roots of this plant, of which 7 were new highly efficient sweet compounds with sweetness ranging from 25 to 400 times that of sucrose.

This article is from Science and Technology Daily