Denatonium Benzoate Anhydrous CAS 3734-33-6

The most common sense of taste in human beings is “sour, sweet, bitter, spicy and salty”, and “bitter” is the most sensitive one in the sense of taste, and many people understand it as an unpleasant or unacceptable feeling. The bitter food in life is mainly bitter gourd and Coptis chinensis. In fact, many substances such as quinine, nicotine, caffeine, cocaine, etc. also have bitter taste. Too bitter taste usually makes people or animals reject this kind of food, so the alkaloids contained in many deadly plants have strong bitter taste. From this point of view, bitter taste undoubtedly plays an important role in protecting life. In order to measure the degree of bitterness, similar to the concepts of acidity, sweetness, and spiciness, people use “bitterness” as a measure. Taking quinine, which is famous for its bitter taste, as the benchmark 1, and taking this as a reference standard, denatonium benzoate (also known as “bitter essence”), an artificial substance with a bitterness of 1,000, is the most bitter compound known so far.

Denatonium Benzodiazem is actually more or less an accidental discovery in the experiment. In 1958, Scottish scientist Macfarlan Smith discovered the substance while studying local anesthetics, and a 10 ppm solution of denatonium benzyl was too bitter for the vast majority of people. Endure, even if the concentration is only 50 ppb (parts per billion, 1 ppm = 1000 ppb), the human taste can perceive bitter taste. Perhaps due to keen business intuition, Smith registered it under the trade name Birex, which was subsequently widely used in industrial alcohol, Antifreeze, animal dispersants, daily chemical products.

Denatonium benzyl is a quaternary ammonium salt composed of a quaternary ammonium salt cation and an inert anion, such as benzoate ion or saccharin anion, in which the structure of the cationic part is particularly similar to that of the local anesthetic Lidocaine . In fact, lidocaine only needs to be alkylated and then anion-exchanged to produce denatonium benzyl. The preparation of lidocaine is also quite easy, using 2, 6-dimethylaniline as the raw material, firstly acylation, and then replacing the halogen with diethylamine.