Using Airway Smooth Muscle To Evaluate Bitterness And ITC To Screen Bitterness Suppressors

Bitter masking is one of the most import projects in pharmaceutics, especially in children’s drug. However, current bitterness evaluation method cannot provide an effective way to evaluate solution bitterness, which greatly limited the research progress of solution bitter masking. Recent research reported that bitter receptors were also found in airway smooth muscle(ASM) while other taste receptors were not. Therefore, we develop an receptor based taste platform for bitterness evaluation via airway smooth muscle. We extract bitter receptors from tracheal smooth muscle tissue of swine to develop the platform and evaluate bitterness intensity by the quantity of bitter compound on the receptors. In this study, we evaluate the bitter intensity of quinine and the effect of its bitterness inhibitors successfully. Using this platform, we will do extensive researches on bitter taste molecules and bitter masking agents. This platform will make great contribute to the simplification of bitter evaluation and the progress of research on bitter masking.Bitterness-suppressing molecules have drawn ever-increasing attention these years for some unique advantages like low molecular weight, tasteless and no interference on drug bioavailability. Tannin was reported to suppress the bitterness of quinine and we happened to find that the suppressing effects could be demonstrated by isothermal titration calorimeter (ITC). In this study, we proposed to evaluate the possibility of using ITC to screen bitterness-suppressing molecules for bitter taste molecules. Among the 20 amino acids we screened, L-Arg, L-lys and L-Gly bond quinine with high affinity. The results of ITC correlated well with the results of human sensory experiments except L-Gly. Therefore, the proposed method of using ITC seems to have a potential for screening bitterness-suppressing molecules.