The molecular feature common to the many different sweet tasting compounds has been sought for many years. A corollary to the thesis that sugar sweetness is inhibited by glycol intramolecular hydrogen bonds is that the primary mechanism for the sweet taste response is intermolecular hydrogen bonding between the glycol group and the taste bud receptor site. The sweet unit of the sugars, that is the glycol unit, can be viewed as a bifunctional entity with an AH and a B component. It is in this sense that we recognize a molecular feature common to the many compounds which taste sweet. In an AH, B system, A and B are electronegitive atoms that are seperated.
H is a hydrogen attached to one of the electronegative atoms by a covalent bond.
It would now seem that the complementary AH, B system needed to elicit sweet taste is a unit common to sweeet tasting compounds which satisfies, regardless of chemical class, the spacial and hydrogen bonding requirements imposed by the receptor site.