Aspartame and Its Microhydrated Aggregates Revealed by Laser Spectroscopy: Water-Sweetener Interactions in the Gas Phase.

The popular sweetener, aspartame, is an agonist of the tongue's sweet taste receptor. How water molecules affect its conformation or which aspartame atoms are more prone to interact with solvent are helpful questions to understand its activity in different environments. Here, the combination of IR-UV spectroscopic techniques with computational simulations has been successfully applied to characterize aspartame·water 0-2 clusters, showing that the addition of water molecules simplifies the conformational panorama of aspartame, favoring the formation of folded structures by interaction with the polar part of the molecule.