Identification in roasted meat

In summary, model studies are very efficient for the identification and structure elucidation of important flavor components. Most of the compounds reported here have not been identified in meat and have not yet been reported as constituents of food volatiles. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to believe that minute traces of these sulfur-containing components are present in roasted and/or cooked meat volatiles because our model system was based solely on naturally occurring precursors. We believe that only minute trace amounts of these types of components need to be present in natural products to be of prime significance due to their extremely low odor threshold values. 

In the mid-1970s, pyrolysis studies with several amino acids led to the isolation and identification of several additional polycyclic A-heterocyclic compounds which are reported not only to be tumorigenic to mouse skin but also to show inordinately high mutagenicity when tested in the Ames bioassay with Salmonella typhimurium. The impetus for these particular amino acid pyrolysis studies was not the attempt to define the relationship between tobacco leaf precursors and tobacco smoke components but the observation that the extracts of broiled, fried, or roasted foodstuffs (meat, fish, poultry, etc.) were highly mutagenic in the Ames bioassay Salmonella typhimurium). These A-heterocyclic... 

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