Miracle fruit
Posted on | June 10, 2010 | 1 Comment
The miracle fruit, or miracle berry plant (Synsepalum dulcificum), produces berries that, when eaten, cause sour foods (such as lemons and limes) subsequently consumed to taste sweet. The berry was first documented by explorer Chevalier des Marchais, who searched for many different fruits during a 1725 excursion to its native West Africa. Marchais noticed that local tribes picked the berry from shrubs and chewed it before meals. The plant grows in bushes up to 20 feet (6.1 m) high in its native habitat, but does not usually grow higher than ten feet in cultivation, and it produces two crops per year, after the end of the rainy season. It is an evergreen plant that produces small red berries, with flowers that are white and are produced for many months of the year. The seeds are about the size of coffee beans.
The berry itself has a low sugar content and a mildly sweet tang. It contains a glycoprotein molecule, with some trailing carbohydrate chains, called miraculin. When the fleshy part of the fruit is eaten, this molecule binds to the tongue’s taste buds, causing sour foods to taste sweet. While the exact cause for this change is unknown, one theory is that the effect may be caused if miraculin works by distorting the shape of sweetness receptors “so that they become responsive to acids, instead of sugar and other sweet things”. This effect lasts 15–60 minutes.
General information and cultivation
The plant grows best at a pH as low as 4.5 to 5.8, in an environment free from frost and in partial shade with high humidity. Without the use of plant hormones or electricity, the seeds have a 24% sprouting success rate. The plants first bear fruit after growing for approximately 2–3 years.
Attempts have been made to create an artificial sweetener from the fruit, with an idea of developing this for diabetics. Fruit cultivators also report a small demand from cancer patients, because the fruit allegedly counteracts a metallic taste in the mouth that may be one of the many side effects of chemotherapy.[2] This claim has not been researched scientifically, though in late 2008, an oncologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, Florida, began a study and, by March 2009, had filed an investigational new drug application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
In Japan, miracle fruit is popular among diabetics and dieters.
In 2006, researchers at the University of Tsukuba genetically engineered lettuce to produce large amounts of miraculin. The scientists’ crops resulted in 40 micrograms of miraculin per gram of lettuce leaves, which was considered a large amount. Two grams of lettuce leaves produced roughly the same amount of miraculin as in one miracle fruit berry. The researchers said that others had unsuccessfully used bacteria, yeast and tobacco plants.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Fruit
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