OT....
Yes Linguagen wants to suppress bitter flavors and has a deal with Kraft. I've been doing a little research, here are some articles.I like SNMX and think its exciting but more DD to come on my part on their cash flow and royalty deals/stream:
Old article
A New Science: Accounting for Taste
Genetics Could Provide Tools to Engineer New Flavors, Fragrances
By Justin Gillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 29, 2001; Page A01
LA JOLLA, Calif. -- A computer jockey named Michael Richards punches a keyboard to search a database of chemicals kept at a biotechnology company here. With a few keystrokes, he calls up one of the more unusual inventory lists in corporate America.
"Harsh but sweet, floral-hay odor; sweet cherry-berry taste," reads the entry for a chemical called 1-acetyl-4-methyl benzene. "Fruity, floral, weak, vanilla-like odor and taste," says another entry, for 4-methoxybenzyl acetate.
The chemicals at Senomyx Inc. are part of new genetic research that is attempting to unravel the human senses of taste and smell. The start-up company is one of several around the country that hope to use that knowledge to come up with flavors and fragrances that effectively create new foods and other products.
It's part of a new discipline that might be called "consumer genetics." There are plans to create seasonings to make vegetables more palatable to young children by blocking specific tastes that overwhelm their palates. Some companies foresee additives that precisely mimic the taste and feel of rich foods without the fat, or room deodorants that temporarily block the ability to perceive nasty smells. Some are interested in developing artificial sweeteners that can survive cooking, as some of today's popular ones cannot.
In the near term, scientists envision medicines, diet sodas and coffee that have no bitter aftertaste because they would contain compounds that momentarily block the tongue's perception of bitterness. The first product from the industry might well be a cough syrup that babies can stand.
The scientists believe that they can eventually not only make ordinary products better but also -- starting with compounds like those in the Senomyx stockroom -- use the tools of genetics to create smells and tastes never before encountered by the human race.
Researchers foresee a time when genetics can explain precisely why one steak tastes better than another, why some people hate broccoli but others love it, and why most of humankind goes crazy for chocolate. They envision a day, moreover, when those responses can be precisely manipulated by adding smells or tastes or suppressing old ones.
As word spreads of the potential of this work, start-up capital is flowing, and genetics companies that previously focused entirely on disease are making deals to use their knowledge in service to the new field.
Some groups that monitor food safety worry that the discipline will spur greater industrialization of agriculture and food production, separating consumers even further from real food grown on real farms. And they say new ingredients produced by molecular techniques will face major safety concerns.
Paul Grayson, chairman and chief executive of Senomyx, is optimistic that such concerns can be allayed. "We want to make healthy food taste better or make good-tasting food healthier," he said.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington publishes lists of food additives, deeming some of them safe and desirable and advising people to avoid others. Its executive director, Michael Jacobson, said he could see some potential benefits from the new technology, such as the ability to make more palatable milk or meat substitutes, reducing the environmental impact of large-scale farming.
But he also expressed concern that, over time, the technology could harm people's diets.
"Companies love artificial flavors and colors because it's cheaper to add them than it is to add, say, strawberry juice to soda pop," he said. "The additives are more economical than the real food, and they can replace the real food. Many people's whole diets are made of fake foods. It seems like this would open up new avenues to facilitate the production of these foods."
Research into food additives has been going on for decades. A vast industry located in factories along the New Jersey Turnpike supplies flavor and odor ingredients by the ton to companies that make consumer goods.
The usual way of finding new ingredients often involves sophisticated chemistry in the early stages but then runs into a bottleneck. New compounds have to be screened by human panels. Hours of tasting or sniffing can overwhelm the senses, and the panels can screen only so many compounds. Many of the additives begin as extracts from plants or animals, and patenting them is difficult or impossible, limiting their profit potential.
The new gene-based companies are devising a much faster and potentially more lucrative way of approaching the problem. As they learn the precise structure of proteins in the tongue or nose that detect taste and smell, they can copy those proteins. The copies can be used to build robotic testing systems that can screen tens of thousands of new chemical compounds a day. If a new compound binds tightly to taste or smell proteins, it's a clue that the compound might elicit a strong sensory perception.
The system is similar to the screening methods that pharmaceutical companies use to find new drugs. Human taste or smell panels would get involved only after much of the drudgery has been handled by machines, and only to sample the most promising compounds. Because they can be created from scratch and not extracted from plants or animals, such additives probably could be patented -- and sold at higher prices than traditional additives.
The most visible company in the field is Senomyx, which has raised about $33 million in start-up money, hired 70 employees, filed for an initial public offering of shares and secured control of an extensive set of patents. Most notably, Senomyx has licensed patents believed to cover virtually all the human genes that permit detection of bitter tastes and it has filed for patents on many of the hundreds of genes involved in smell.
Grayson, the Senomyx chief executive, said the company's research method will resemble that of a pharmaceutical company, but product development should be far easier. Pharmaceutical companies must not only test their products to ensure safety, they also must put them through lengthy trials to determine whether they are effective. For Senomyx, once a compound passes safety tests, proving that it works should be a simple matter of tasting or smelling it.
The company would make much of its money by collecting royalties on products whose sales increased with Senomyx ingredients -- a radically different business model from that of the traditional flavor and fragrance companies.
The technology could, in principle, be used to alter the genetics of plants or animals to make them tastier. But Grayson, noting the rising public concern about genetically modified food, said Senomyx does not plan to do that. "We're not trying to replace food," he said, just create new ingredients to make existing food taste better.
The concept is unproven so far, but big consumer-product companies are interested. Senomyx has signed major research deals with Kraft Foods Inc., the nation's largest packaged-food company, and with Campbell Soup Co., which owns such brands as Pepperidge Farm, Swanson and V8.
Other companies are also pursuing such research. A smaller company, Linguagen Corp. of Paramus, N.J., controls key patents and is busy devising compounds, including a "bitter blocker." Smaller start-up companies are in the early stages.
Some huge consumer companies, notably Procter & Gamble Co. of Cincinnati, have started genetics programs. P&G, which sells $40 billion worth of consumer products every year, confirmed that it is buying gene-analysis devices from a California company, Affymetrix Inc., but would not reveal the goals of its research except to say they do not involve food or beverages. P&G sells many products that depend on odor ingredients.
One of the leading scientists in the field, and a founder of Senomyx, is Charles Zuker, a biologist at the University of California at San Diego. Many of the proteins that detect bitter tastes were discovered in his laboratory, which licensed patents on them to Senomyx.
In an interview, Zuker expressed excitement about the potential of the field. "I hate drinking diet soda," he said, lauding the prospect of an additive that could block the aftertaste of artificial sweeteners. But he also noted that many foods and drinks are very complicated mixtures of chemicals that scientists won't be able to emulate with artificial ingredients anytime soon.
He seemed to derive some comfort from that fact.
"It's going to be a while," he said, "before you take a poor bottle of wine and turn it into a wonderful Petrus or Cheval-Blanc."
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MOre recent article:
brightsurf.com
Rockefeller University -- Two researchers at Rockefeller University
have put a controversial theory of smell to the sniff test and have
found no evidence to support it.
They say their study, published in the April issue of Nature
Neuroscience, should raise firm doubts about the validity of
"vibration theory," which states that molecules in each substance
generate a specific vibration frequency that the nose can interpret as
distinct smells.
The reigning theory of smell, which also is as yet unproven, is that
the shape of a chemical determines how it smells - much the same way
as taste works.
However, at present there is no way to look at a chemical and predict
what it will smell like. This is different from other sensory stimuli
that are defined by simple physical properties. Color, for example, is
defined by the wavelength of light.
While experiments conducted in this study were not designed to confirm
the "shape theory," the results support the theory favored by most
scientists, that shape of the odor molecule is the most important
determinant of its smell.
"We didn't disprove the vibration theory. We just didn't find anything
to support it," says assistant professor Leslie B. Vosshall, Ph.D.,
head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior. "All of our data
are consistent with the shape theory, but don't prove the shape
theory."
The findings are important in the sometimes contentious field of smell
research because it is the first time vibration theory has actually
been put to the rigor of a controlled and double-blind human test, the
Rockefeller researchers say.
Andreas Keller, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Vosshall's lab,
conducted a series of experiments that the principle proponent of
vibration theory, the biophysicist Luca Turin, Ph.D., said would prove
that his theory is correct.
Turin himself proposed the experiments in a theoretical paper but
never undertook them, Keller says. Since Turin's theory was based
solely on his unverified reports about the smell of certain odorants,
the scientific community rejected it as "a universal theory of smell
based on one man's olfactory impressions."
Turin's theory has attracted public attention thanks to a BBC
documentary about him and last year's publication of the book "The
Emperor of Scent." The book's author, Chandler Burr, argues that Turin
is a pioneering researcher who is being ignored by the smell research
community because of his unconventional ideas.
Because Turin's theory have received so much press attention, Vosshall
explains that it was time for science to step in. "Our only goal is to
do what Turin said should be done, in a properly controlled fashion,"
she says.
"I just did the experiments that Luca Turin suggested - but never
actually did," says Keller. "He predicted what the outcomes would be,
but we couldn't produce them."
Smell is the last of the senses to be explained. Most researchers
believe in the "lock and key" shape theory, which says the shape of a
chemical (the "key") fits into odorant receptor proteins on the
outside of cells ("locks") that are dedicated to the sense of smell.
Activated receptors promote neuronal activity in the brain that, by a
still mysterious process, leads to the perception of distinct odors.
But the problem with the shape theory is that humans have only 347
different odorant receptor proteins dedicated to smell, as researchers
working at Senomyx discovered in 2001. A strict lock-and-key mechanism
would allow humans to smell only 347 different chemicals, called
odorants, when, in fact, thousands are discernable.
So, researchers now believe that only part of the curves and angles
that make up odorant chemicals need to fit into the receptor. "It is
probably because the lock is a little loose that different keys can
fit into the same lock," says Vosshall. Still, loose locks can't
explain the phenomenon by which two chemicals, each with a unique
shape, can smell the same. "There are cases that are not intuitive for
the shape theory, and that is why scientists have been looking for
alternative theories for a very long time," Vosshall says.
Turin, who is a physiologist by training and a recognized expert on
perfumes, expanded upon a theory first offered in the 1930s that smell
depends on intramolecular vibrations of the odor molecule - basically
the characteristic "stretching" of its chemical bonds and not the
shape of molecules. He hypothesizes that receptors in the lining of
the nose function as a biological "spectroscope" to measure vibrations
of a chemical odorant.
According to Turin, electrons in the receptor protein can lose energy
by exciting the vibrational mode of a bound odorant. This only happens
for a specific energy of this vibrational mode and, therefore, a
receptor is only activated by odorants with a given vibrational
energy.
To test Turin's theory empirically, Keller designed a series of three
experiments based on experiments that Turin had proposed to prove
vibration theory. Keller recruited several dozen human volunteers to
the new outpatient unit of The Rockefeller University Hospital to
smell different odors presented in vials, which were coded so that he
did not know what they contained. The sniffing subjects then answered
a series of questions, such as whether the two odors smelled different
or the same.
In the first experiment, Turin predicted that if two different
chemicals (guaiacol, which smells smoky, and benzaldehyde, which
smells like bitter almond) were mixed together, they would smell like
vanilla, because their combined molecular vibrations would match those
of vanilla. None of Keller's subjects reported that the mixture had a
stronger smell of vanilla than did either of the two chemicals by
themselves.
In the second experiment, Keller tested whether aldehydes composed of
an even number of carbon atoms smell different from those with an odd
number. Aldehydes are a family of odorants made famous by being the
major components of Chanel No. 5 perfume, and Turin predicted that the
vibration of odd versus even aldehydes would not be the same because
the aldehyde group of even number aldehydes would have more freedom to
rotate, producing different vibrational frequencies. But vials
consisting of two odd or two even aldehydes were not perceived by
participants as more similar than vials containing an odd and an even
number aldehyde, Keller says.
Vosshall adds that, in fact, this experiment supports the shape theory
"because the more different in size the aldehydes are from each other,
the easier it is for the human subjects to tell them apart."
The final experiment, a test of both the shape and vibration theory,
is based on Turin's proposal that two chemicals that have almost
identical shapes (acetophenone and deuterated acetophenone) have
markedly different molecular vibrations and therefore distinct smells.
Deuterated acetophenone is acetophenone that is modified to have all
its hydrogen atoms replaced by deuterium atoms. This minor chemical
change has only slight effects on shape, but according to Turin has
major effects on vibration. In several different tests, none of the
subjects could tell the difference between the two.
"They smelled the same to the subjects, which again points to a shape
theory," Vosshall says. "Does that mean that no human on Earth is able
to tell the difference? No, and we weren't able to test Luca Turin. It
is possible that other people can do it, but not our subjects."
Because the study was not designed by the researchers to prove either
theory, but rather to put Turin's theoretical approach to the test,
"this is a paper of solely negative results," Vosshall says. "It shows
us that molecular vibrations alone cannot explain the perceived smell
of a chemical."
The study by Keller and Vosshall shows that hypotheses, no matter how
intriguing they sound, have to be tested in rigorous experiments. It
doesn't tell us how the sense of smell works, yet. But Keller adds
that he plans to conduct additional experiments, of his own design, to
help tease out the truth behind smell.
-----
A Matter of Taste
New flavor enhancers due in 2006 promise to make your taste buds more efficient.
From: Issue 92| March 2005 | Page 35 By: Lucas Conley
Innovation: Chemical flavor enhancers
Available: 2006
How often have we heard this? "Half the sugar, half the fat -- with that same great taste!" Right. But for the first time, one company may not be feeding us a line. Senomyx Inc., a biotech outfit in La Jolla, California, is designing chemical compounds called "flavor enhancers," which it claims target taste receptors on the tongue, dramatically improving their efficiency. So less sugar (or salt) will taste just as good.
Senomyx is screening hundreds of thousands of compounds to find matches for each region of taste. Its savory compounds, pending government approval, would allow food makers to cut back on or eliminate unpopular additives such as MSG. They could find their way into commercial products within a year, with sweet and salt compounds to follow by 2007. Nestle SA, Coca-Cola, Kraft, and Campbell Soup Co. have all signed on to fund Senomyx research.
The results could solve one of the food industry's greatest dilemmas: While ingredients such as salt and MSG may improve flavor, the amounts required to do the job can be unhealthy. In the past, food companies have tried to dupe taste buds with artificial substitutes -- such as Splenda -- which generally taste fake. Senomyx, by contrast, hopes to change how our tongues work. In the case of sugar, which is picked up by receptors on the tongue, flavor enhancers bind to the receptors and lower their threshold for stimulation, creating the same taste with less sugar. In the lab, Senomyx's prototype boosted flavor by 40%.
CEO Kent Snyder believes flavor enhancers could find a place in the pharmacy, masking the bitter tastes of many medicines. He could face competition from Linguagen Corp., which has patented a compound intended to suppress bitter flavors and has a deal with Kraft. But the market probably is large enough for both, according to Smith Barney analyst Elise Wang, who sizes potential revenues for flavor-enhanced foods at at least $36 billion a year. Very sweet |
