Confusing your taste buds
Have you ever tried eating something, expecting it to taste like one thing, but instead it tasted like another? For example, you took a sip of what you thought was water but instead was buko juice?
[Yes, it has happened to me. It was terrifying.]
It’s not so much that I didn’t like buko juice, but it was that expectation of water (and the flavor that came) that really messed with my head. But this is cognitive factors we’re talking about. What if there was a physical way to eat a lemon and come out saying “man, that was sweet!”
[Effectively not looking like *that*]
It turns out, there’s a special fruit that has this kind of effect. It’s called the “Miracle Berry”, and it has the miraculous effect of making sour things taste sweet after taking a bite of it.
[Not a normal berry.]
The secret to the “miraculous” effect was the aptly named protein miraculin. Interestingly, there hasn’t been much research on how it actually works its magic. A few years ago, however, Ayako Koizumi and her colleagues in the University of Tokyo were able to figure out what exactly happens in our tongue when we eat it.
[:P~]
They found that miraculin sticks to the taste receptors responding to sweetness. When exposed to acidic stimuli, miraculin distorts the receptors to an active shape, which make them extra sensitive to sweet things. Thus, the shape changing causes signal firing from the sweet receptors, even though they aren’t eating anything sweet!
[AMAZE]
It holds some pretty potentially amazing applications, such as reducing actual sugar intake of people (which supposedly is one of the causes for diabetes). It’s even cooler to think about when you realize that these “miracle berries” are natural! Here’s hoping for new discoveries with this magical fruit!
References:
Koizumi, Tsuchiya, Nakajima, Ito, Terada, Shimizu-Ibuka, Briand, Asakura, Misaka & Abe. 2011. Human sweet taste receptor mediates acid-induced sweetness of miraculin. PNAShttp://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1016644108
