''Capparis masaikai'', known as mabinlang,Data Portal of the

Global Biodiversity Information Facility The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international organisation that focuses on making scientific data on biodiversity available via the Internet using web services. The data are provided by many institutions from around the ...

(GBIF)
Biodiversity occurrence data for Capparis masaikai H. Léveillé
grows in the subtropical region of the

Yunnan Yunnan , () is a landlocked Provinces of China, province in Southwest China, the southwest of the People's Republic of China. The province spans approximately and has a population of 48.3 million (as of 2018). The capital of the province is ...

province of

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

and bear fruits of tennis-ball size. The mature seeds are used in

traditional Chinese medicine Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is an alternative medical practice drawn from traditional medicine in China. It has been described as "fraught with pseudoscience", with the majority of its treatments having no logical mechanism of action ...

. They are also used as sweets; the seeds elicit a sweet taste when chewed.X Liu, S Maeda, Z Hu, T Aiuchi, K Nakaya, Y Kurihara. Purification, complete amino acid sequence and structural characterization of the heat-stable sweet protein, mabinlin II. Eur J Biochem 1993. 211(1–2):281-7. The origin of the sweet taste was identified as sweet-tasting

proteins Proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including catalysing metabolic reactions, DNA replication, respo ...

named

mabinlin Mabinlins are sweet-tasting proteins extracted from the seed of mabinlang ('' Capparis masaikai Levl.''), a plant growing in Yunnan province of China. There are four homologues. Mabinlin-2 was first isolated in 1983 and characterised in 1993, ...

s. They are highly sweet, 100-400 times sweeter than sucrose on a weight basis.S Nirasawa, T Nishino, M Katahira, S Uesugi, Z Hu, Y Kurihara. Structures of heat-stable and unstable homologues of the sweet protein mabinlin. Eur J Biochem 1994, 223(3):989-95.

References

masaikai Flora of China {{Brassicales-stub