Lady tasting tea revisited: A nanozyme-based artificial taste sensor for tea differentiation and brewing process analysis

The “Lady Tasting Tea” is a classic experiment in statistics, often celebrated for its contribution to the field, though the lady’s extraordinary taste sensitivity is less frequently acknowledged. Herein, we developed a highly sensitive nanozyme-based artificial taste sensor, which differentiates teas and brewing processes, similar to the “Lady Tasting Tea” experiment. The sensor employs PdSb concave nanocubes, which exhibit enhanced peroxidase activity due to the oxophilicity of Sb, to construct a cross-responsive sensing platform that simultaneously identifies tea polyphenols and authenticates complex blank tea samples. With its multi-differentiation ability to simulate human taste, this platform objectively demonstrates the flavor differences in milk tea based on the order of milk and tea addition, providing reliable data to distinguish taste differences without subjective interference. Overall, this work presents a new approach for designing nanozyme-based sensing platforms to simulate human taste.