Isolation and identification of sweet substances and sweet aftertaste substances in the fruit of Phyllanthus emblica

Low-calorie sweeteners are widely used to replace or reduce sugar in foods and beverages, and the taste and texture of existing sweeteners are far from that of real sugar. The use of sweetness positive aliasing modifiers is an ideal alternative that can reduce the amount of sugar used while maintaining the original sugar taste. However, the currently available sweetness aliasing agents are synthetic compounds, while natural sweetness aliasing agents have not been reported. Studies have shown that there are potential sweetness modifiers in plants with a “Sweetback effect”. The sensory activity fractionation of the extract of the fruit of Phyllanthus emblica was performed to locate the key chemical compounds in P. emblica for sweetness and sweetness aftertaste. The chemical structures of the isolated compounds were analyzed by spectroscopic methods such as ESI-MS and NMR ( 1 H NMR, 13 C NMR). Fifteen compounds were identified, namely, 2-Furoic acid (1), quercetin (2), p-hydroxybenzaldehyde (3), methyl gallate (4), ethyl 3,4,5-trimethoxybenzoate (5), syringic acid, (6), gallic acid (7), vanillin (8), protocatechuic acid (9), myricetin (10), kaempferol (11), trans-cinnamic acid (12), naringenin (13), oleanolic acid (14), and rutin (15). Sensory analysis of these chemical components showed that 11 of them (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15) were compounds with a sweet taste and the other four (7, 9, 10, 11) were compounds with a sweet aftertaste. Experiments on the sweetness regulating properties of sucrose revealed that the sweet aftertaste component in P. emblica has sweetness inverse variant regulator properties and naringenin has sweetness forward variant regulator properties.