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Sweet Taste of D and L-Sugars and Amino-acids and the Steric Nature of their Chemo-receptor Site

Abstract

IN an attempt to identify the feature common to various and seemingly unrelated compounds which taste sweet, we suggested1 that the saporous unit of all sweet tasting compounds was a bifunctional group consisting of an acidic (AH) and a basic (B) moiety with an A—H proton to B distance of about 3 Å. The common unit described seems to be very similar to that proposed by Warfield2, in which the common molecular feature was visualized as a “taste couple” composed of a proton and a neighbouring, unshared electron pair.

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SHALLENBERGER, R., ACREE, T. & LEE, C. Sweet Taste of D and L-Sugars and Amino-acids and the Steric Nature of their Chemo-receptor Site. Nature 221, 555–556 (1969). https://doi.org/10.1038/221555a0

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