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Category: food – Page 100

A team of University of British Columbia researchers working on developing oral insulin tablets as a replacement for daily insulin injections have made a game-changing discovery.

Researchers have discovered that insulin from the latest version of their oral tablets is absorbed by rats in the same way that injected insulin is.

“These exciting results show that we are on the right track in developing an insulin formulation that will no longer need to be injected before every meal, improving the quality of life, as well as mental health, of more than nine million Type 1 diabetics around the world.” says professor Dr. Anubhav Pratap-Singh (he/him), the principal investigator from the faculty of land and food systems.

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Osaka Metropolitan University scientists have developed a simple, rapid method to simultaneously identify multiple food poisoning bacteria, based on color differences in the scattered light by nanometer-scaled organic metal nanohybrid structures (NHs) that bind via antibodies to those bacteria. This method is a promising tool for rapidly detecting bacteria at food manufacturing sites and thereby improving food safety. The findings were published in Analytical Chemistry.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), every year food poisoning affects 600 million people worldwide—almost 1 in every 10 people—of which 420,000 die. Bacterial tests are conducted to detect food poisoning bacteria at food manufacturing factories, but it takes more than 48 hours to obtain results due to the time required for a bacteria incubation process called culturing. Therefore, there remains a demand for rapid testing methods to eliminate food poisoning accidents.

Responding to this need, the research team led by Professor Hiroshi Shiigi at the Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka Metropolitan University, utilized the optical properties of organic metal NHs—composites consisting of polyaniline particles that encapsulate a large number of metal nanoparticles—to rapidly and simultaneously identify food poisoning-inducing bacteria called enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (E. coli O26 and E. coli O157) and Staphylococcus aureus.

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Vietnam is the world’s second-largest rice exporter, and XAG says its agricultural drones have become the “new favorite” of farmers that grow the crop.

Lê Thành Nguyên, at 62 years old, is one of the early adopters of agricultural drones in Vietnam. This year, he used drones on his seven-hectare rice farm for crop spraying, fertilization, and direct seeding by ordering the service from a local pilot team.

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Basically this special bacterium Ideonella sakaiensis could solve the plastic crisis in the oceans by eating the plastic.

Plastic polymer PET degrading enzymes are of great interest for achieving sustainable plastics recycling. Here, the authors present the crystal structures of the plastic degrading bacterial enzymes PETase, MHETase in its apo-form and MHETase bound to a non-hydrolyzable substrate analog.

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Corneal blindness occurs when the transparent membrane that covers the front of the eye and acts as a lens becomes opaque and prevents the light from reaching the back of the eye, inhibiting vision. It can be solved with a transplant, but experts estimate that 12.7 million people are currently waiting for a cornea donation. These membranes are in short supply: for every 70 that are needed, only one is available. In view of this problem, especially in countries where there are fewer donations of human corneas due to limited infrastructure, a group of Swedish researchers tested corneas made from pig skin collagen in 20 people who needed transplants (all of them Iranian or Indian citizens; 14 of them were blind). After two years, they all showed improvement, and those who were blind could see again. Although more complex clinical trials are still necessary to validate the measure, the first test of this bioengineered corneal tissue has proven to be safe. The results of this pilot study were published in the Nature Biotechnology journal.

There is also a socioeconomic aspect to corneal blindness: one million new cases are diagnosed every year, but according to researchers, most are concentrated in low-and middle-income countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East – precisely where it is most difficult to obtain a donated human cornea, due to endless “economic, cultural, technological, political and ethical barriers.” Finding an alternative to the human cornea transplant is key, the authors point out, to fighting keratoconus, a disease that weakens and thins the cornea, and which is the reason for most transplants.

In order to find an alternative to donated human cornea, the researchers bioengineered collagen, the main protein in the human cornea, as a raw material. “For an abundant yet sustainable and cost-effective supply of collagen, we used medical-grade collagen sourced from porcine skin, a purified byproduct from the food industry already used in FDA-approved medical devices for glaucoma surgery and as a wound dressing,” they explain in the article. Unlike the human corneas, which must be used in less than two weeks, bioengineered corneas can be stored for up to two years.

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Pawpaw varieties are assessed on their flavor, yield, fruit size, texture, and disease resistance, Crabtree says. She adds that the “best varieties” would be high yield trees that produce a pawpaw with “firmness and/or creaminess that’s not watery, mushy, or gritty” as well as a lower percentage of seeds.

Hunting for pawpaw

Native to 26 states, pawpaw can be found along the East Coast between Ontario, Canada, and northern Florida west to Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, Nebraska, Kansas, and even Texas.

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Taste matters to fruit flies, just as it does to humans: like people, the flies tend to seek out and consume sweet-tasting foods and reject foods that taste bitter. However, little is known about how sweet and bitter tastes are represented by the brain circuits that link sensation to behavior.

In a new study published in Current Biology, researchers at Brown University described how they developed a new imaging technique and used it to map the neural activity of fruit flies in response to sweet and bitter tastes.

“These results show that the way fly brains encode the taste of food is more complex than we had anticipated,” said study author Nathaniel Snell, who earned his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brown in 2021 and conducted the research as part of his thesis.

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