A video on lab grown meat. Meat grown from cells taken from animals. đ
How do you like your beef, the traditional way or 3D-printed? đ đ€
Find out more at https://bit.ly/39kIeCN # engineering.
Category: food – Page 183
With fall and winter holidays coming up, many will be pondering the relationship between food and sleep. Researchers led by Professor Masashi Yanagisawa at the University of Tsukuba in Japan hope they can focus people on the important middlemen in the equation: bacterial microbes in the gut. Their detailed study in mice revealed the extent to which bacteria can change the environment and contents of the intestines, which ultimately impacts behaviors like sleep.
The experiment itself was fairly simple. The researchers gave a group of mice a powerful cocktail of antibiotics for four weeks, which depleted them of intestinal microorganisms. Then, they compared intestinal contents between these mice and control mice who had the same diet. Digestion breaks food down into bits and pieces called metabolites. The research team found significant differences between metabolites in the microbiota-depleted mice and the control mice. As Professor Yanagisawa explains, âwe found more than 200 metabolite differences between mouse groups. About 60 normal metabolites were missing in the microbiota-depleted mice, and the others differed in the amount, some more and some less than in the control mice.â
The team next set out to determine what these metabolites normally do. Using metabolome set enrichment analysis, they found that the biological pathways most affected by the antibiotic treatment were those involved in making neurotransmitters, the molecules that cells in the brain use to communicate with each other. For example, the tryptophanâserotonin pathway was almost totally shut down; the microbiota-depleted mice had more tryptophan than controls, but almost zero serotonin. This shows that without important gut microbes, the mice could not make any serotonin from the tryptophan they were eating. The team also found that the mice were deficient in vitamin B6 metabolites, which accelerate production of the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine.
Artificial intelligence is being applied to virtually every aspect of our work and recreational lives. From determining calculations for the construction of towering skyscrapers to designing and building cruise ships the size of football fields, AI is increasingly playing a key role in the most massive projects.
But sometimes, all we want to do is move a can of beans.
According to a recently published abstract by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, they have developed a mechanism that âcouples a perception pipeline predicting a target object occupancy support distribution with a mechanical search policy that sequentially selects occluding objects to push to the side to reveal the target as efficiently as possible.â
Sales for the category have exploded as the pandemic disrupts business as usual. Is this because people are turning away from animal-based eating, or is it keeping with the segmentâs trends?
AI, Genetics, and Health-Tech / Wearables â 21st Century Technologies For Healthy Companion Animals.
Ira Pastor ideaXme life sciences ambassador interviews Dr. Angela Hughes, the Global Scientific Advocacy Relations Senior Manager and Veterinary Geneticist at Mars Petcare.
The global petcare industry is significantly expanding, with North America sales alone expected to hit US $300 billion by 2025. And while we may associate the Mars Corporation, the worldâs largest candy company, with leading confectionary brands like Milky Way, M&Mâs, Skittles, Snickers, Twix, etc. They also happen to be one of the worldâs largest companies in pet care as well.
Dr. Angela Hughes, is the Global Scientific Advocacy Relations Senior Manager & Veterinary Geneticist at Mars Petcare. Dr. Hughes is both Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, and a PhD with a focus in Canine Genetics, both from the University of California, Davis. Dr. Hughes also serves as Veterinary Genetics Research Manager of Wisdom Health, a business unit of Mars Petcare, which has developed state-of-the-art genetic tests for companion animals, leading to revolutionary personalized petcare. She also serves as a Veterinary Geneticist of Hughes Veterinary Consulting, focused on small animal and equine genetics and with a special interest in small animal reproduction and pediatrics.
Dr Hughes is published in multiple academic journals, including the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association and has contributed chapters for publication in Veterinary Clinics of North America Small Animal Practice: Pediatrics and Large Animal Internal Medicine.
Scientists find that A. echinatior ants have biomineral armour to help them in battle with other ants and protect them from pathogens. đ
Ants are pretty organised little creatures. Highly social insects, they know how to forage, build complicated nests, steal your pantry snacks, and generally look after the queens and the colony, all by working together.
Leaf-cutter ants turn that cooperation up several notches. Leaf-cutter ant colonies like Acromyrmex echinatior can contain millions of ants, split into four castes that all have different roles to maintain a garden of fungus that the ants eat.
These farming ants might make a top-tier team of gardeners, but that doesnât mean they donât get into the occasional scrap, and living in such large groups usually also means facing an increased risk of pathogens.
10% longer.
Reduced food intake, known as dietary restriction, leads to a longer lifespan in many animals and can improve health in humans. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying the positive effects of dietary restriction are still unclear. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Aging have now found one possible explanation in fruit flies: they identified a protein named Sestrin that mediates the beneficial effects of dietary restriction. By increasing the amount of Sestrin in flies, researchers were able to extend their lifespan and at the same time these flies were protected against the lifespan-shortening effects of a protein-rich diet. The researchers could further show that Sestrin plays a key role in stem cells in the fly gut thereby improving the health of the fly.
The health benefits of dietary restriction have long been known. Recently, it has become clear that restriction of certain food components, especially proteins and their individual building blocks, the amino acids, is more important for the organismâs response to dietary restriction than general calorie reduction. On the molecular level, one particular well-known signaling pathway, named TOR pathway, is important for longevity.
âWe wanted to know which factor is responsible for measuring nutrients in the cell, especially amino acids, and how this factor affects the TOR pathway,â explains Jiongming Lu, researcher in the department of Linda Partridge at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Aging. âWe focused on a protein called Sestrin, which was suggested to sense amino acids. However, no one has ever demonstrated amino acid sensing function of Sestrin in a living being.â Therefore, Lu and his colleagues focused on the role of Sestrin in the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as fruit fly.
Using drones for agriculture! Technology used to benefit one of the oldest industries. đ
Designed for use in agriculture, the new DJI T20 is bringing the latest tech to one of the worldâs oldest industries đ đ.
O,.o Circa 2019
CRISPR/Cas9 is now a household name associated with genetic engineering studies. Through cutting-edge research described in their paper published in Scientific Reports, a team of researchers from Tokyo University of Science, Meiji University, and Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, led by Dr Takayuki Arazoe and Prof Shigeru Kuwata, has recently established a series of novel strategies to increase the efficiency of targeted gene disruption and new gene âintroductionâ using the CRISPR/Cas9 system in the rice blast fungus Pyricularia (Magnaporthe) oryzae. These strategies include quicker (single-step) gene introduction, use of small homologous sequences, and bypassing of certain prerequisite host DNA âpatternsâ and host component modification.
The team led by Dr Arazoe and Prof Kuwata has devised simple and quick techniques for gene editing (target gene disruption, sequence substitution, and re-introduction of desired genes) using CRISPR/Cas9 in the rice blast fungus Pyricularia (Magnaporthe) oryzae, a type of filamentous fungus. Spurred on by encouraging results, the researchers surmise, âPlants and their pathogens are still coevolving in nature. Exploiting the mutation mechanisms of model pathogenic fungi as a genome editing technique might lead to the development of further novel techniques in genetic engineering.â
The working component of the CRISPR/Cas9 system binds to the target gene region (DNA) and causes a site-specific double-stranded break (DSB) in the DNA. Effective binding of this component requires a certain âmotifâ or âpatternâ called the protospacer-adjacent motif (PAM), which follows downstream of the target gene region.