Sweet Protein from Truffle A Fungal Protein That Tastes Sweet Without the Sugar

This patent describes newly identified sweet-tasting proteins found in truffles, the DNA that codes for them, and ways to produce and use them as sweeteners. It comes from MycoTechnology, Inc., a Colorado company that develops food ingredients using mushroom fermentation.

The Problem

Eating too much sugar is linked to obesity, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes and dental decay, and consumers have been trying to cut back for years. Food manufacturers have responded with a familiar list of substitutes: aspartame, acesulfame potassium, monk fruit extract, neotame, saccharin, stevia and sucralose. Almost all of them share a problem. They do not taste like sugar. Many carry a bitter or metallic aftertaste, a slow onset, or a lingering finish, and formulators spend considerable effort masking those defects.

A different approach uses sweet proteins, of which only seven were previously known: brazzein, thaumatin, monellin, curculin, mabinlin, miraculin and pentadin. These can be extraordinarily potent, with monellin roughly 100,000 times sweeter than sucrose on a molar basis, and thaumatin around 3,000 times sweeter gram for gram. But the pool is small, the key residues on the protein surface responsible for the sweet effect have never been pinned down with certainty, and most of these proteins come from tropical plants that are difficult to farm at scale.

What This Invention Does

The application describes a new group of fungal sweet-taste modifying proteins, designated Myd proteins, isolated from truffles, which are the underground fruiting bodies of certain ascomycete fungi that grow in association with tree roots. Alongside the proteins themselves, it covers the complementary DNA that encodes them, methods for isolating that DNA, and methods for expressing and isolating the resulting proteins.

Because the sweetness comes from a gene sequence rather than a harvested crop, the proteins can in principle be produced by fermentation rather than by digging up truffles, which is the practical route to making them affordable. The application also claims sweetening compositions containing these proteins and methods of using them to improve the flavour of products taken by mouth, which covers both outright sweetening and the subtler job of modifying taste, for example by suppressing bitterness in a reduced-sugar formulation.

Key Features

• New fungal sweet proteins. Myd proteins active in sweet taste activation, identified from truffle fungi, expand a previously tiny group of known sweet proteins.
• Encoding DNA disclosed. The cDNA sequences encoding the proteins are described, enabling production by expression rather than extraction.
• Isolation methods. Methods are provided for isolating both the cDNA and the expressed proteins.
• Sweetening compositions. Compositions incorporating the proteins are claimed as sweeteners.
• Flavour improvement. Methods are described for improving the flavour of products for oral administration, including taste modification rather than pure sweetening.

Who Is Behind It

The applicant is MycoTechnology, Inc. of Aurora, Colorado, founded in 2013, which uses mushroom mycelium fermentation to make food ingredients including bitterness-blocking flavour modulators and fermented plant proteins. The application names twelve inventors including Marina Nadal, Anthony J. Clark, Zheyuan Guo, Stephen A. Gravina, Anthony Westgate, Bassam Alkotaini, Ashley Han and Brendan Sharkey. It is a divisional of Australian application 2023266307, with priority dating to June 2020 and an international filing under PCT/US2021/039176.

Why It Matters

Sugar reduction is one of the largest reformulation programs in the global food industry, driven by health guidelines and, in a growing number of countries, by sugar taxes. Australia has debated a sugar levy repeatedly and food regulators here continue to push voluntary reformulation. The commercial prize goes to whichever ingredient can cut sugar without the aftertaste that makes shoppers put the product back on the shelf. A protein sweetener produced by fermentation is also attractive on supply grounds, since it does not depend on a tropical harvest. Whether these particular proteins clear the regulatory path to the dinner table is a separate question: novel food proteins require safety assessment by Food Standards Australia New Zealand before they can be sold here.

Related Concepts

• Sweet protein – the small family of intensely sweet proteins this work adds to.
• Truffle – the fungus the new proteins were identified in.
• Sugar substitute – the market category these ingredients compete in.
• Precision fermentation – the production route that makes protein sweeteners viable at scale.
• Taste receptor – the biology that determines whether a molecule reads as sweet.
• Food Standards Australia New Zealand – the regulator that would assess a novel food protein for the Australian market.

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AU 2026202027 was published in the Australian Official Journal of Patents on 9 April 2026 and is open for public inspection. Patent applications represent inventions that are sought to be protected and do not necessarily reflect commercially available products.