SuperSweet--a resource on natural and artificial sweetening agents

Abstract

A vast number of sweet tasting molecules are known, encompassing small compounds, carbohydrates, d-amino acids and large proteins. Carbohydrates play a particularly big role in human diet. The replacement of sugars in food with artificial sweeteners is common and is a general approach to prevent cavities, obesity and associated diseases such as diabetes and hyperlipidemia. Knowledge about the molecular basis of taste may reveal new strategies to overcome diet-induced diseases. In this context, the design of safe, low-calorie sweeteners is particularly important. Here, we provide a comprehensive collection of carbohydrates, artificial sweeteners and other sweet tasting agents like proteins and peptides. Additionally, structural information and properties such as number of calories, therapeutic annotations and a sweetness-index are stored in SuperSweet. Currently, the database consists of more than 8000 sweet molecules. Moreover, the database provides a modeled 3D structure of the sweet taste receptor and binding poses of the small sweet molecules. These binding poses provide hints for the design of new sweeteners. A user-friendly graphical interface allows similarity searching, visualization of docked sweeteners into the receptor etc. A sweetener classification tree and browsing features allow quick requests to be made to the database. The database is freely available at: http://bioinformatics.charite.de/sweet/.

Internet Databases of the Properties, Enzymatic Reactions, and Metabolism of Small Molecules—Search Options and Applications in Food Science

“…Examples of specialized databases include FooDB, which lists food components, and SuperSweet [46], which contains information about sweet substances. FooDB is provided by WishartLab at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.…”

“…SuperSweet, a database provided by Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany, lists natural and synthetic sweet substances [46]. Compound information includes synonyms, sweetness (quantified as the ratio of compound sweetness to glucose sweetness), visualization of molecular docking to a sweetness receptor model, and links to PubChem.…”

“…Enzymatic reactions play an increasingly important role in food technology [46]. Information from databases may support investigations aimed at application of enzymes in food technology.…”

GPCR & Company: Databases and Servers for GPCRs and Interacting Partners

“…In SuperScent, SuperSweet and BitterDB some of the data on each molecule can be downloaded separately. In SSFA-GPHR the search results as 2D Snake plot or 3D homology model can be downloaded Several specialized databases are devoted to sensory receptors, including OdorDB, Olfactory Receptor Database (ORDB) (Crasto et al 2002(Crasto et al , 2003, Database of Odor Responses (DoOR) (Galizia et al 2010), ODORactor (Liu et al 2011), The Human Olfactory Data Explorer (HORDE) database (Olender et al 2004;Safran et al 2003) SuperScent (Dunkel et al 2009), SuperSweet (Ahmed et al 2011) and BitterDB (Wiener et al 2012).…”

“…In addition, SuperSweet contains a homology model of the T1R 3 -T1R 2 sweet receptor dimer. For some of the sweet compounds, the server provides docking poses in the model structure (Ahmed et al 2011).…”