Boffins measure hotness of chillies using nanotubes

9 May 2008 | 15:50 BST

By Sylvie Barak

CHEMISTRY BOFFINS FROM OXFORD university have invented a way of gauging how hot a chili sauce is using carbon nanotubes.

The Oxford uni team, led by Professor Richard Compton, had been looking into different ways to measure the amounts of capsaicinoids in chillies, which is ultimately what makes them hot. Their findings are served up by the Royal Society of Chemistry journal The Analyst.

The spice-crazed boffins reckon their new method could revolutionise the way food is tested for “hotness”, if they became available as low-cost, throw-away sensors.

The way chillies are currently tested is by having a human taste panel, which means that the results are subjective rather than scientific. The panel uses the Scoville method, which involves diluting pepper sauces over and over again until the heat can no longer be detected.

But the Oxford team have found that letting the capsaicinoids absorb into multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) electrodes works even better, as the team can then measure electrical current fluctuations as the capsaicinoids are oxidised in a series of electrochemical reactions. The results can then easily be translated into the already widely accepted Scoville units.

Professor Compton’s team is calling their method, which precisely determines the exact number of capsaicinoids to be found in a chillie sauce, the adsorptive stripping voltammetry (ASV). The technique has already been used on sauces ranging from the super mild to the mad, raging, near head exploding (think ‘Mad Dog’s revenge’).

Compton reckons that the beauty of the discovery is that “it’s so simple” due to the fact that “all of the capsaicinoids have essentially the same electrochemical response”.

Oxford University is now hoping that the food industry will be hotly responsive to the technology which is currently being patented, and hopes to find backers to take the technique to new commercial heights. µ

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