LINDELL BEACH, B.C. – Imagine eating sour food that tastes sweet.
Japanese researchers say it’s possible if consumers also munch on a few special tiny tomatoes to fool the taste buds.
Studies at the University of Tsukuba and Inplanta Innovations Inc. focused on the compound miraculin found in the miracle fruit native to West Africa.
Miraculin is not sweet, but it can convert a sour taste into a sweet taste by binding to taste buds and altering the tongue’s sweet receptors so that they activate when sour or acidic foods are eaten such as lemons, limes, pickles or vinegars.
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The palate remains rewired for sweetness for up to an hour.
The researchers genetically modified tomatoes using the miraculin gene to create a tiny tomato with the same taste altering qualities as the wild African berries.
Miracle berries come from the Synsepalum dulcificum plant, whose fruit has been enjoyed for centuries in West Africa. European explorers to the region in the 18th century observed native people eating them before a meal.
Miracle berries grow on bushes that can reach six metres in height in their native habitat. They can produce two fruit crops a year after the end of the rainy season.
The bush is an evergreen with seeds about the size of coffee beans and white flowers that produce the small red berries. Under the right conditions, it can produce for many months of the year.
However, the shelf life of fresh fruit is short, only two days.
In the United States, miracle plants are grown in warm regions, especially Florida, where the risk of frost is minimal. However, bushes grow to only half the size of their tropical relatives.
Research on the fruit and the miraculin compound has been conducted for decades.
In 1968, a research paper published inSciencemagazine identified the active ingredient as a glycoprotein, and in 1989 its 191 amino acid properties were identified.
In the mid 1970s, American entrepreneurs worked on developing a miraculin-based product to meet the needs of dieters because it would allow them to eat low-calorie but sour food.
However, regulatory challenges resulted in the product not making it to market because the Food and Drug Administration identified it as a food additive.
Today, freeze-dried miracle fruit can be found through on-line sources as a dietary supplement and food enhancer.
However, researchers have found that while miraculin can turn sour things sweet, it does not alter the chemistry of acidic food, which leaves the mouth and stomach vulnerable to irritation for those who may be sensitive to acid-based food.
In 2006, researchers at the University of Tsukuba genetically modified lettuce to contain miraculin.
In their most recent research, they genetically modified tiny tomatoes by crossing a transgenetic tomato line, Moneymaker, with a dwarf tomato, Micro-Tom, which allowed for the molecular breeding of miraculin cultivars suitable for cultivation in closed plant factory conditions.
The researchers eventually plan to produce tiny miraculin-rich tomatoes mass-reared indoors with limited risk of infection or blight and then process, package and market them as a pre-meal snack or perhaps processed into health-food capsules of miraculin.
Their results, which were published in theJournal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry,showed that the cultivar Cross No. 1 produced the most succulent and bushy growth and proved to be the best line with respect to fruit yield.
