How Do You Make Sweet?

0:00What do sweet fruit and scorpion poisons have in common? Find out next on today's Creation Moment. And now here's our Creation Moment host, Ian Taylor. How do you make something that is sweet or anything else of that matter? I'm not talking about adding sugar to a recipe. Let's say that God provided you with all the atoms of the various elements you needed to make a molecule that tastes sweet. If you were to make such a molecule, you would need to know the construction of the sweet taste receptors on your tongue. You would need to know which molecular shapes would bind to those receptors. And you would have to understand how all the different elements bind to one another and what molecular shapes they would have. The complexity of this task was well illustrated when researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison released a computer model of a plant protein that tastes sweet. The protein called brazing is about 2000 times sweeter than sugar

1:00and occurs naturally in the West African fruit. Brazing's coiled molecular shape illustrates the importance of a molecule's shape. If the molecule uncoils, perhaps due to heat, it loses all its sweetness. Its structure does not resemble the structures of two other sweet plant proteins. Rather, it closely resembles scorpion poisons and proteins used by some plants for self-defense. The more we learn about how things work in the world around us, the clearer it becomes that everything that exists has been carefully designed to interact in very specific ways. We learn more about this creator though, not from molecules, but from his holy word, the Bible. To get free samples of our custom gospel tracks and other outreach materials that focus on biblical creation and salvation through Jesus Christ, visit us at creationmoments.com or call us toll free at 1-842-Bible. That's 1-800-422-4253.