Aspartame, discovery

During the synthesis of a gastrin tetrapeptide Schlatter et al. 237) made the incidental but extremely interesting discovery that the dipeptide aspartylphenylalanine methyl ester 112 (aspartame) is 100-200 times as sweet as sucrose. 

Because of this difficulty in predicting what features are necessary for a compound to taste sweet, most of the discoveries of artificial sweeteners have been serendipitous. In fact, many of the early discoveries resulted from dangerous laboratory practices that we would not condone today. For example, the sweetness of saccharin was discovered in 1879 by a chemist who spilled some of the compound on his hand. Later, while eating lunch in the laboratory, he noticed the extremely sweet taste. The sweetness of cy-clamate was discovered in 1937 by a chemist who tasted it on a cigarette that he had set on the lab bench. And aspartame was found to be sweet by a chemist who got some on his hand and later licked his Finger before picking up a piece of paper. This resulted in a billion-dollar-per-year product ... 

At this point in one synthesis of the tetrapeptide in the laboratories of Sear le, the American pharmaceutical company, a remarkable discovery occurred. The AspPhe methyl ester was accidentally found to taste sweet extremely sweet—about 200 times as sweet as sucrose. AspPhe is now known as aspartame, marketed under the brand name Nutrasweet. 

Aspartame, the artificial sweetener marketed as NutraSweet , is a dipeptide, which was discovered in 1965 by accident to be 100-200 times sweeter than sucrose. The discovery was originally made at G.D. Searle, which was later acquired by Monsanto. 

Among the food science developments helpful to diabetics have been the discovery and commercial distribution of several synthetic noncarbohydrate sweetening agents. Three that have been approved by the American Diabetes Association are saccharin, acesulfame-K, and aspartame ... 

Some of the most important advancements of science are the results of accidental discoveries—for example, penicillin, Teflon, and the sugar substitutes cyclamate and aspartame. Another important chance discovery occurred in 1964, when a group of scientists using platinum electrodes to apply an electric field to a colony of E. coli bacteria noticed that the bacteria failed to divide but continued to grow, forming long, fibrous cells. Further study revealed that cell division was inhibited by small concentrations of c/s-Pt(NH3)2Cl2 and... 

Since the accidental discovery of aspartame in 1965, much effort has been focused on development of an understanding of the biochemical mechanism of sweet taste with the expectation that such knowledge would facilitate the rational design of novel sweeteners with increased stability and potency relative to that of aspartame. To date, although a great deal of inferential data suggests that sweetener receptors are members of the G-protein coupled receptor super family, no sweetener receptor has been isolated or characterized. As a consequence, many sweetener receptor and pharmacophore models have been developed based on the structure-activity relationships (SAR) among known sweeteners. 

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