From MinuteFood.

You know how these things start; I go down a weird food-related rabbithole and then next thing I know, I’m inviting my friends and acquaintances and anyone else I can find to sniff stinkbugs or eat a ridiculous number of spicy peppers.
This time, it was all about this plant – Synsepalum dulcificum – which traditionally grows thousands of miles from my kitchen, in West and Central Africa. Well, actually, it was all about this plant’s berries, because they contain a glycoprotein – that’s nerd-speak for a protein with a carbohydrate tacked onto it – that fits into your sweet taste receptor. Normally, sugars – and artificial sweeteners – lock into this receptor, which triggers a cascade of chemical signals that tell your brain that something is sweet. But when this particular glycoprotein fits in there, well… uh… actually nothing happens – see, the protein itself isn’t sweet. But if there’s acidity around, the hydrogen ions cause the shape of the glycoprotein to change a little bit, and this change triggers that sweet, sweet chemical cascade.
In other words, a protein in this berry fools your taste buds, making things that contain acid – things that are normally sour – taste sweet.
So I bought enough miracle berries for a crowd and gathered the weirdest assortment of foods I could think of; some super-sour, some super-sweet, and some in-between.
First we tasted stuff sans miracle berries.
Then, everybody took two freeze dried miracle berry halves, and sucked on them for a while; this spreads that glycoprotein – which scientists have named “miraculin” – around, allowing it to come into contact with your sweet receptors. And the effect is almost immediate.
In general, the more acidic the food, the stronger the effect; miraculin can make super-sour foods taste as sweet as a 17 percent sucrose solution – that’s stronger than almost all known sweeteners.
The whole experience was honestly pretty mind-bending, because we were perceiving something – sweetness – that wasn’t actually there. Which, by the way, is the literal definition of a hallucination.

𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗱 (𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲) 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀:
-https://botany.one/2019/05/miraculin-the-miracle-in-miracle-fruit/
-https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/adventures-with-miracle-fruit/
-https://uchicagobite.com/blog/2019/3/17/sour-sweet-then-gona-how-miracle-fruit-tricks-your-tastebuds
-https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/taste-tripping-with-miracle-berries
-https://imbibemagazine.com/miracle-fruit/
-https://cen.acs.org/articles/88/i21/Taking-Trip-Down-Sensory-Lane.html