2023 December

Our day-to-day lives are being increasingly infiltrated by what is given the catchall name of artificial intelligence. Perfumers are no exception. So how does AI change our relationship with the creative process? Drawing on an historical analysis of his profession, Jean-Claude Ellena offers a review of these new technologies, often championed by the perfumery industry.

An astonishing 226% increase in test results.

The perception of taste is one of the most important senses and helps us identify beneficial foods and avoid harmful substances. For instance, our fondness for sweet and savory foods results from our ...

Experts predict 2024’s hottest food and beverage flavor trends.

Let’s peek into an integral part of all perfume testings by getting acquainted with blotter production company Scentis and taking a look at the beautiful and unconventional design of blotters. Not so long ago I told you that I met a company Scentis at the BEAUTY ISTANBUL exhibition, whose unusual “Wet & See” blotters caught my eye. After the exhibition, I decided to talk more with Scentis and take a look at

What does 'banana' have to do with 'handball'?

Community matters among bacteria when it comes to producing full-flavoured cheddars

Let's take a geek's journey to the heart of olfactory receptors, sources of unexpected hope, with Jérémie Topin, Assistant professor at Université Côte d'Azur, and Matej Hladis, PhD student, both members of GDR 03.

This mysterious ingredient was often found in medieval Arabic books of medicine and botany.

Analysis of 3D images reveals the organ’s bumps and grooves are as personal as fingerprints

Scientists bring lab-grown coffee closer to your cup.

Nonalcoholic beer may sound like an oxymoron, but newer techniques are producing tasty, high-quality options in this growing beverage category.

Odor is central to food quality. Still, a major challenge is to understand how the odorants present in a given food contribute to its specific odor profile, and how to predict this olfactory outcome from the chemical composition. In this proof-of-concept study, we seek to develop an integrative model that combines expert knowledge, fuzzy logic, and machine learning to predict the quantitative odor description of complex mixtures of odorants. The model output is the intensity of relevant odor sensory attributes calculated on the basis of the content in odor-active comounds. The core of the model is the mathematically formalized knowledge of four senior flavorists, which provided a set of optimized rules describing the sensory-relevant combinations of odor qualities the experts have in mind to elaborate the target odor sensory attributes. The model first queries analytical and sensory databases in order to standardize, homogenize, and quantitatively code the odor descriptors of the odorants. Then the standardized odor descriptors are translated into a limited number of odor qualities used by the experts thanks to an ontology. A third step consists of aggregating all the information in terms of odor qualities across all the odorants found in a given product. The final step is a set of knowledge-based fuzzy membership functions representing the flavorist expertise and ensuring the prediction of the intensity of the target odor sensory descriptors on the basis of the products' aggregated odor qualities; several methods of optimization of the fuzzy membership functions have been tested. Finally, the model was applied to predict the odor profile of 16 red wines from two grape varieties for which the content in odorants was available. The results showed that the model can predict the perceptual outcome of food odor with a certain level of accuracy, and may also provide insights into combinations of odorants not mentioned by the experts.

As kids, we’re naturally more likely to enjoy sweet and salty tastes and reject bitterness. But that changes as we grow older.

This review presents an outline of the application of the most popular sorbent-based methods in food analysis. Solid-phase extraction (SPE) is discussed based on the analyses of lipids, mycotoxins, pesticide residues, processing contaminants and flavor compounds, whereas solid-phase microextraction (SPME) is discussed having volatile and flavor compounds but also processing contaminants in mind. Apart from these two most popular methods, other techniques, such as stir bar sorptive extraction (SBSE), molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs), high-capacity sorbent extraction (HCSE), and needle-trap devices (NTD), are outlined. Additionally, novel forms of sorbent-based extraction methods such as thin-film solid-phase microextraction (TF-SPME) are presented. The utility and challenges related to these techniques are discussed in this review. Finally, the directions and need for future studies are addressed.

A bit of moisture can keep static electricity out of your coffee.

Join Leyla Kazim for a tour of New Year’s Eve food traditions around the world.

Framed freshwater fish, integral to “blue food,” address global protein demands for population growth. Rising concerns about inherent off-flavors limi…

Many people eat round fruits to celebrate the new year, but what does this tradition mean? Here's why round fruits are an important New Year's symbol.

Edible insects could be the key to a more sustainable food system, yet food regulations could be restricting alternative environmentally friendly sources of protein for consumers, a new report has found.

We truly are one of a kind.

Even small doses of toxins from these plants could kill people. Read to learn more. There are certain plants that may have a harmless look but are actually some of the deadliest ones on the planet.

People who are suspicious of science often assume they are understand it well – and that others agree with them.

Droughts, heat, and extreme weather are pushing crops to their limits. The race is on to innovate faster than the Earth warms.

A battery-like device known as a supercapacitor can be created from different parts of aloe vera plants – and it can be used to make living plants power lights

European Food Research and Technology - Saffron, a spice obtained by drying the scars of saffron flowers (Crocus sativus L.), is by far the most valuable spice in the world, and, not surprisingly,...

The rational discovery of behaviorally active odorants is impeded by a lack of understanding on how the olfactory system generates percept or valence for a volatile chemical. In previous studies we showed that chemical informatics could be used to model prediction of ligands for a large repertoire of odorant receptors in Drosophila (Boyle et al., 2013). However, it remained difficult to predict behavioral valence of volatiles since the activities of a large ensembles of odor receptors encode odor information, and little is known of the complex information processing circuitry. This is a systems-level challenge well-suited for Machine-learning approaches which we have used to model olfaction in two organisms with completely unrelated olfactory receptor proteins: humans (~400 GPCRs) and insects (~100 ion-channels). We use chemical structure-based Machine Learning models for prediction of valence in insects and for 146 human odor characters. Using these predictive models, we evaluate a vast chemical space of 10 million compounds in silico. Validations of human and insect behaviors yield very high success rates. The discovery of desirable fragrances for humans that are highly repulsive to insects offers a powerful integrated approach to discover new insect repellents. ### Competing Interest Statement A.R. is Founder and President of Sensorygen Inc and Remote Epigenetics Inc. J.K. is CTO of Sensorygen Inc. A.R., J.K. and S.M.B. have equity in Sensorygen and are inventors on patents filed by University of California and licensed to the startups. Sensorygen is involved in commercializing insect repellents and fragrances and flavors.

For the manufacturing and sale of tea, rapid discrimination of overall quality grade is of great importance. However, present evaluation methods are t…

Researchers from Linköping University in Sweden developed a ‘bioelectronic soil’ that can speed up the growth of plants in controlled agricultural farming environments.