The incidence of external and internal bitter pit in ‘Cox’s Orange Pippin’ apple (Malus domestics Borkh.) fruit sprayed with normal therapeutic sprays either with or without Ca salts at 2-week intervals during the growing season was determined after 6 weeks of storage over 7 consecutive years. Following harvest, fruit was either vacuum-infiltrated with CaCI2 or received no further treatment. Al...

Conventional taste-masking strategies are used to overcome the bitter taste perception of pharmaceuticals by coating the drug particles and/or adding flavoring agents. However, for certain product categories such as rapid dissolve sublingual tablets, taste-masking is challenging. Programs exploring such formulation strategies in the LO-CS phase or post CS phase possess very little toxicological...

BACKGROUND Bitter herbs are important in Traditional Chinese Medicine and the Electronic Tongue (e-Tongue) is an instrument that can be trained to evaluate bitterness of bitter herbs and their constituents. The aim of this research was to evaluate bitterness of limonoids and alkaloids from Evodia rutaecarpa to demonstrate that they are main bitter material basic of E. rutaecarpa. METHODS Nine...

Rejection of bitter substances is common in many species and may function to protect an animal from ingestion of bitter-tasting toxins. Since many plants are bitter, it has been proposed that high tolerance for bitterness would be adaptive for herbivores. Earlier studies conducted on herbivorous guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus) have been used to support this proposal. We tested guinea pigs with bi...

The levels of quinolizidine alkaloids in lupin seeds vary depending on the botanical and geographical origin of the lupin variety from which theyderive. “Bitter lupins” produce seeds which have a bitter taste due to the higher levels of quinolizidine alkaloids they contain. Bitter lupin seeds are not suitable for human consumption without appropriate pre-treatment (“debittering”). Lupin varieti...

In this study, amygdalin contents in the seeds of ten different bitter or sweet apricot cultivars were determined by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) for two years. The seeds of apricot cultivars were obtained from the Malatya Fruit Research Institute in Turkey. The results indicated that genetic variation was found among the cultivars. The amygdalin contents of bitter cultivars we...

Intraoral infusions of bitter tastants activate expression of the immediate-early gene c-Fos in neurons located in the medial third of the rostral nucleus of the solitary tract (rNST). The distribution of these neurons is distinct from that activated by sour or sweet stimuli. Bitter stimuli are also distinctive because of their potency for eliciting gaping, an oral reflex that functions to acti...

In flies and humans, bitter chemicals are known to inhibit sugar detection, but the adaptive role of this inhibition is often overlooked. At best, this inhibition is described as contributing to the rejection of potentially toxic food, but no studies have addressed the relative importance of the direct pathway that involves activating bitter-sensitive cells versus the indirect pathway represent...

"Sweet-" and "bitter-" tasting substances distinctively support attractive and aversive choice behavior, respectively, and therefore are thought to be processed by distinct pathways. Interestingly, electrophysiological recordings in adult Drosophila suggest that bitter and salty tastants, in addition to activating bitter, salt, or bitter/salt sensory neurons, can also inhibit sweet-sensory neur...

The combination effects of light and air temperature, which were expressed as photothermal ratio (PTR), on the growth and sex expression of three monoecious cucumbers (Cucumis sativus L. cv. “Xintaimici”, “Jinyan 3” and “Jinyan 4”) were studied with hydroponics in this research. The results showed that with the increase of PTR, different growth responses were observed in the three cucumber cult...