Sweet Proteins

Comparison of thaumatin, monellin, mabinlin, pentadin, brazzein, curculin and miraculin.

	Thaumatin	Monellin	Mabinlin	Pentadin	Brazzein	Curculin	Miraculin
Source	Thaumatococcus danielli Benth	Dioscoreophyllum cumminsii Diels	Capparis masakai Levl	Pentadiplandra brazzeana Baillon	Pentadiplandra brazzeana Baillon	Curculingo latifolia	Richadella dulcifica
Geographic distribution	West Africa	West Africa	China	West Africa	West Africa	Malaysia	West Africa
Variants	I, II, a, b, ca	-	I, II- a, III, IVa	-	-	-	-
Sweetness factor (weight basis)	3000	3000	100	500	2000	550	-
Molecular mass (active form, kDa)	22.2	10.7	12.4	12.0b	6.5	24.9	98.4
Amino acids	207	45 (A chain) 50 (B chain)	33 (A chain) 72 (B chain)	?	54	114	191
Active form	Monomer	Dimer (A B)	Dimer (A B)	?	Monomer	Dimer (A A)	Tetramer (A A A A)
Source: Adapted from Kurihara (1994). aAt least five different forms of thaumatin (Lee et al., 1988) and four different forms of mabinlin (Nirasawa et al., 1994) have been identified. bA chromatographic fraction containing a 12-kDa protein was sweet. This same fraction, when subjected to electrophoresis under non-reducing conditions showed bands in the region between 22 and 41 kDa, suggesting the presence of subunits.