Sugars amino acids, interaction

The flavor industry has introduced, over the years, methods of developing meat flavors by processing appropriate precursors under carefully controlled reaction conditions. As a result, meat flavors having a remarkably genuine meat character in the beef, chicken and pork tonalities are available for the food industry. It has repeatedly been stated that the Maillard reaction is particularly important for the formation of meat flavors. However, of the 600 volatile compounds isolated from natural beef aroma, only 12% of them find their origin in sugar/amino acid interactions and of these 70% are pyrazine derivatives. 

Root exudates A wide variety of chemicals, such as sugars, amino acids, and aromatics, is excreted by roots of plants. Very little information is available on the allelopathic interaction of root exudates with the higher plants, except for the identification of a few products in isolated cases (46). 

The majority of heterocyclic compounds are formed through thermal interactions of reducing sugars and amino acids, known as Maillard reactions. Other thermal reactions such as hydrolytic and pyrolytic degradation of food components (e.g. sugars, amino acids and vitamins) and the oxidation of lipids also contribute to the formation of heterocyclic compounds responsible for the complex flavor of many foodstuffs. 

According to several authors, cheese taste is mainly due to the compounds found in the cheese water-soluble extract (WSE) (1, 2). Thus, to study cheese taste, the focus is usually on the cheese WSE which contains small polar molecules such as minerals, acids, sugars, amino acids, peptides and some volatile compounds produced by different processes such as lipolysis, proteolysis microbial metabolism (3). These compounds are responsible for the individual taste sensations like sourness, bitterness and saltiness which are the main taste descriptors for cheese. However, in a complex mixture they also exert otiier taste sensations due to taste / taste interactions (4). Peptides are generally considered to be the main bitter stimuli in cheese (5). However, it was shown that in goat cheese, bitterness resulted mainly from die bitterness of calcium and magnesium chlorides, partially masked by sodium chloride (6). 

Figure 1 The proposed ADP-GIc binding domain of the glycogen synthase. The amino acids interacting with AMP portion of the sugar nucieotide are in red. Those binding with the Glc-1-P portion are in blue.

The economical value and high popularity of meat lead to the production of meat-like flavors through process chemistry. Several heat-induced reactions lead to the formation of meat flavors. These reactions are the pyrolysis of peptides and amino acids, the degradation of sugars, the oxidation, dehydration, and decarboxylation of lipids, the degradation of thiamin and ribonucleotides, and interactions involving sugars, amino acids, fats, H2S, and NH3 [110],... 

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