Soymilk flavour is formed by a complex combination and interaction of multiple chemical compounds. To improve the soymilk flavour, soybean lines lacking one or more lipoxygenase isozymes had been developed and the aroma constituents of soymilk were analysed PD98059 concentration (Kobayashi, Tsuda, Hirata, Kubota, & Kitamura, 1995). In these lines, although

the yields of volatile compounds were greatly decreased, the chemical compounds responsible for the beany flavours still remained (Kobayashi et al., 1995 and Torres-Penaranda and Reitmeier, 2001). In our study, we also detected the soymilk flavour attributes in two series of near isogenic lines with or without lipoxygenase isozymes. Unfortunately, no significant correlation between the lipoxygenase-lacking lines and soymilk flavour parameters was observed (data not shown). This implied that there may exist an oxidative rancidity of unsaturated fatty acids in soymilk (Wolf, 1975), in addition to lipoxygenase mediated oxidation. Taken together, our study demonstrated that, as a comprehensive evaluation index, overall acceptability is the most important parameter

for soymilk sensory evaluation due to the significant Selleckchem XL184 correlation with other flavour indexes and seed chemical quality parameters (Table 3 and Table 4). Therefore, this parameter could be used to select soybean cultivars with good soymilk flavour attributes. SAS 9.2 software was used to analyse the soymilk sensory attributes using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). PCA is a widely used multivariate analytical statistical method, which could reduce the set of dependent variables to a smaller number based on the original variables’ correlation pattern (Lawless & Heymann, 1998). In this study, six principle components (PCs) were

identified and the first four PCs could explain 85.03% of the total variance. As shown in Fig. 1, the first component (PC1) explaining 36.86% of the total variance was designated as unless the soymilk overall flavour factor, as it was mainly associated with soymilk overall acceptability (r = 0.557) and sweetness (r = 0.540). The second component (PC2) explaining 21.90% of the total variance was designated as the soymilk taste factor, as it was primarily associated with soymilk thickness in the mouth (r = 0.600) and smoothness in the mouth (r = −0.593). The third component (PC3) explaining 15.42% of the total variance was designated as the soymilk appearance factor for its strong association with soymilk colour and appearance (r = 0.776). The fourth component (PC4) explaining 10.85% of the total variance was designated as the soymilk aroma factor for its primary association with soymilk aroma (r = 0.737). The above results were mainly based on the preference of soymilk for Chinese consumers.