Structure-activity relationship of highly sweet natural products

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the structure-activity relationship of highly sweet natural products. It may be seen that ongoing research activities on the isolation and characterization of naturally occurring sweet principles have continued to afford many novel molecules in several structural classes. These compounds occur in species representing a taxonomically wide range of plant families. Methodology has been developed in terms of candidate plant selection, dereplication of sugars, polyols and sweet phenylpropanoids, and in other phytochemical procedures, such that significant progress can be made in the elucidation of further highly sweet-tasting molecules with only a modest investment of capital. To being used in an unmodified form as sweeteners, plant-derived sweet-tasting molecules can serve as useful lead molecules for synthetic optimization. Therefore, knowledge of structure-sweetness relationships of plant sweeteners, and their naturally occurring congeners and semi-synthetic analogs is of use in assisting with the rational design of new sweeteners based on natural product leads.