Abstract:Umami and umami-enhancing peptides are the key components of novel umami flavorings. They have advantages of naturalness, higher nutritional value, and better umami taste over glutamate. There are a wide variety of umami and umami-enhancing peptides and these peptides can, as precursors, directly affect the flavor characteristics of food by participating in relevant reactions. The number of reported umami and umami-enhancing peptides is 208 and 60, respectively. For umami peptides, their amino acid composition and spatial structure are the most two important factors affecting the umami intensity, while the structure-activity relationships of umami-enhancing peptides are more complicated, which needs to be further studied. Meanwhile, umami and umami-enhancing peptides are active reactants of many reactions (enzymatic and non-enzymatic), generating the derivatives having better umami taste or umami-enhancing ability under certain conditions. In this review, the structural characteristics of umami and umami-enhancing peptides were systematically studied and their relevant reactions, as well as the flavor features of the expected products, were discussed based on different processing methods. Furthermore, some problems with the study and possible solutions are summarized to support the scientific research about umami and the development of the condiment industry.
