Why is the flesh of melon sweet and the skin bitter? Urgent! ! !

Because melon skin contains picroside.

Ordinary melon, also called Hami melon, is a common fruit in life, but some melons are not sweet but bitter because they contain bittersweet ingredients. In the process of melon growth, the last nutrients are transported by pedicels to supply melon growth.

However, plants contain bitter rosin, and high content will affect the taste of melons. If the content is normal, the melon has no bitterness. If the content is too high, the skin and even the pulp of the melon will be bitter.

Extended data

The researchers found that the bitter taste of cucumber was caused by triterpene cucurbitacin C, a highly oxidized tetracyclic triterpene compound, which only existed in cucurbitaceae (cucumber, watermelon and melon, etc.). ). Bitterness is the most prominent feature of this kind of compounds, so cucurbitacin is also bitter. A very small amount of cucurbitacin (0. 1 mg/L) can cause obvious bitterness, which is about 0/00 times more bitter than the typical bitter agent caffeine.

The discovery of picroside is of great significance to cucumber breeding and the development of anti-tumor drugs. The growth of plants faces various external biotic and abiotic stresses. Oxypicrin is the best defense weapon and can be used to resist the invasion of pests and diseases.

Therefore, picroside is a green pesticide to protect plants. By studying the functional genome and metabonomics of cucumber, scientists found that by controlling the differential accumulation of picroside in cucumber leaves and fruits, super-fine cucumber varieties with bitter leaves and no bitter fruits can be cultivated.

In India, bitter wild cucumber fruits and leaves are not only used as laxatives, but also used to treat various inflammations. Modern medical research has found that picroside in melon pedicel has been extracted and developed into an effective drug for treating liver diseases.

In recent years, the newly discovered medicinal value of bitter rosin has attracted people's attention, and bitter rosin has a very good effect on the treatment of tumors. Because the content of picroside in cucumber is extremely low, it is of great medical significance for the application of industrial picroside in clinical tumor treatment to improve the content of picroside by analyzing its metabolic pathway and synthetic biology technology.

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