The properties of acids says that acids are sour in taste but in Apple there is malic acid which is sweet .why?
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Answer:
Malic acid is an organic compound with the molecular formula C4H6O5. It is a dicarboxylic acid that is made by all living organisms, contributes to the sour taste of fruits, and is used as a food additive. Malic acid has two stereoisomeric forms (L- and D-enantiomers), though only the L-isomer exists naturally. The salts and esters of malic acid are known as malates. The malate anion is an intermediate in the citric acid cycle.
Sweetness is one of the main drivers of consumer preference, and thus is given high priority in apple breeding programmes. Due to the complexity of sweetness evaluation, soluble solid content (SSC) is commonly used as an estimation of this trait. Nevertheless, it has been demonstrated that SSC and sweet taste are poorly correlated. Though individual sugar content may vary greatly between and within apple cultivars, no previous study has tried to investigate the relationship between the amount of individual sugars, or ratios of these, and apple sweetness. In this work, we quantified the major sugars (sucrose, glucose, fructose, xylose) and sorbitol and explored their influence on perceived sweetness in apple; we also related this to malic acid content, SSC and volatile compounds. Our data confirmed that the correlation between sweetness and SSC is weak. We found that sorbitol content correlates (similarly to SSC) with perceived sweetness better than any other single sugar or total sugar content. The single sugars show no differentiable importance in determining apple sweetness. Our predictive model based on partial least squares regression shows that after sorbitol and SSC, the most important contribution to apple sweetness is provided by several volatile compounds, mainly esters and farnesene.