Chemists have been trying to understand flavor and odor for centuries but their efforts have been more or less futile. Oh yes, they could point to a few chemicals that smelled like rotten eggs, or tasted sweet, sour or bitter; they found chemicals that were astringent, hot, cool even umami. But they could not taste a wine or smell a flower and explain all their experiences in chemical terms. The turning point in their efforts came when they started to think like biochemists and realized they were not studying chemical composition but biological response to subsets of chemical mixtures. Like biochemists, who separate enzymes from other proteins using bioassays to direct their efforts, flavor chemists need to study more biology. At the center of the problem was this and to some extent it still is: Predicting flavor from component chemistry requires that we understand how stimulant signals are processed into perceptions and behavior.In olfaction, for example, there is growing evidence that a small subset (2-5) of a limited number (~ 30) of active odorants (those above their threshold) drive odor perception in food. Humans seem to experience these odorants in at least two ways: When odorants stimulate olfactory receptors in the nose, signals are sent to the brain, where they are (1) integrated into a single instantaneous perception of an odor image like Riesling aroma or (2) parsed into component perceptions and experienced separately e.g. petrol, citrus, and passion fruit. One hypothesis is that mixtures of a few (2 to 5) odorants in foods determine instantaneous olfactory perception. Alternatively the instantaneous perception may include odorants not recognizable in the mixture. In this presentation I will review the history of this, pointing out the important role Thomas Hofmann has played in this journey and discuss where we may need to go from here.

Sensory directed flavor studies: Or using biochemistry to do chemistry

248th National Meeting (2014)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.