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Category: food – Page 327

How Fungus And Synthetic Biology Could Save Astronauts On Mars

Clay Wang brought his kids to the California Space Center a few years ago to show them the Space Shuttle. But as he looked up at Endeavour and pondered human space exploration, the pharmacologist wondered, “What if a crew runs out of medicine halfway to Mars?”

A lot of things can go wrong during a three-year mission to Mars, and there’s only so much medicine you can pack. “For food you can predict exactly how much the astronauts will need to eat,” says Wang. “Medicine you can’t predict.”

What if they develop a sudden need for a drug that wasn’t packed? Compounding the problem is the fact that the space environment seems to make many drugs lose potency and degrade more quickly compared to drugs on Earth.

CRISPR Could Usher in a New Era of Delicious GMO Foods

That brought a lot of media attention, and Giorgio got skittish. “They didn’t want to have the perception from customers that their company was developing genetically modified organisms,” says Yang. Yang is still working to perfect the anti-browning in his academic lab, but he has no immediate plans to commercialize it.

The anti-browning trait might also just be a tough sell to customers: When a Canadian apple wanted to sell a GM apple that doesn’t brown—genetically altered through conventional means—it had to battle assumptions that growers just wanted to hide bruised produce. Which is, well, true. Produce that doesn’t brown when handled does also mean less waste for stores and growers.

In Sweden, Jansson is no stranger to unease over genetic engineering. His colleagues recently returned from a conference where activists flung cow dung and eggs at scientists. The CRISPR-edited cabbage he grew he actually got from researchers outside Sweden, who did not want their names or even their country revealed, fearing backlash from environmental activists. Jansson did his cabbage stunt because he wanted people to start thinking about what CRISPR could mean for food.

The Synthetic Biology Era Is Here – How We Can Make the Most of It

We are entering an era of directed design in which we will expand the limited notion that biology is only the ‘study of life and living things’ and see biology as the ultimate distributed, manufacturing platform (as Stanford bioengineer, Drew Endy, often says). This new mode of manufacturing will offer us unrivaled personalization and functionality.

New foods. New fuels. New materials. New drugs.

We’re already taking our first steps in this direction. Joule Unlimited has engineered bacteria to convert CO2 into fuels in a single-step, continuous process. Others are engineering yeast to produce artemisinin — a potent anti-malarial compound used by millions of people globally. Still other microbes are being reprogrammed to produce industrial ingredients, like those used in synthetic rubber.

Long-sought ‘warm-sensitive’ brain cells identified in new study

A new UC San Francisco study challenges the most influential textbook explanation of how the mammalian brain detects when the body is becoming too warm, and how it then orchestrates the myriad responses that animals, including humans, use to lower their temperature—from “automatic” physiological processes such as sweating and panting, to complex behaviors, such as moving to cooler environs. These responses are vital to health, as the metabolic processes that keep us alive have evolved to operate within a narrow temperature range.

Experiments on these questions dating back 80 years, using rats and mice, have repeatedly pointed to a tiny brain region known as the preoptic hypothalamus (POA) as the site that detects the body’s warmth. But because this compact area governs functions as diverse as sleep, mating, parental behaviors, eating, and drinking, it has been difficult to precisely pinpoint which cells and circuits are dedicated to detecting and responding to warmth.

“We know a lot about how body temperature is regulated in peripheral tissues, and a bit about the key regulatory brain regions, but the identity of the neurons that act as the master regulators of body temperature has been elusive,” said UCSF’s Zachary Knight, PhD, assistant professor of physiology and senior author on the new UCSF study, which appears in the September 8, 2016 online issue of Cell.

Biotech startup says it has nearly perfected making wine in a lab

Ava Winery’s first public taste test didn’t exactly go well. Two reporters on camera at New Scientist compared the biotech startup’s artificial wine with a glass of the Moscato D’Asti that it was based on. They complained that the fake wine had too little color, too little viscosity, and an unpleasant plastic smell.

But that was May, and this is September, and Ava is already bragging about making huge improvements in its product, to the point where it is all but indistinguishable from fermented grape juice, and looking ahead to how it’s going to change the world.

“What we have done since then is leaps and bounds beyond what they were able to taste back in May,” co-founder Alec Lee says. “Now we’re at the point where about 90% of people fail out blind taste test.”

Surprisingly, Plant Microbes May Be An Answer To Our Growing Food Needs

By Sveta McShane: Organizations as diverse as the United Nations and Monsanto are in agreement that we need to double our food production globally by 2050 to feed the world’s population…

Awaken

But our current agricultural process is one of the biggest contributors to global warming. It emits more greenhouses gases than all the world’s cars combined and is a major consumer and polluter of our precious water resources.

MIT News: Hacking microbes

Micro-manufacturing is perfecting quality control.

Biology is the world’s greatest manufacturing platform, according to MIT spinout Ginkgo Bioworks.

The synthetic-biology startup is re-engineering yeast to act as tiny organic “factories” that produce chemicals for the flavor, fragrance, and food industries, with aims of making products more quickly, cheaply, and efficiently than traditional methods.

“We see biology as a transformative technology,” says Ginkgo co-founder Reshma Shetty PhD ’08, who co-invented the technology at MIT. “It is the most powerful and sophisticated manufacturing platform on the planet, able to self-assemble incredible structures at a scale that is far out of reach of the most cutting-edge human technology.”

Tapping the unused potential of photosynthesis

Scientists from the University of Southampton have reengineered the fundamental process of photosynthesis to power useful chemical reactions that could be used to produce biofuels, pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals.

Photosynthesis is the pivotal biological reaction on the planet, providing the food we eat, the oxygen we breathe and removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

Photosynthesis in plants and algae consists of two reactions, the light-reactions absorb light energy from the sun and use this to split water (H2O) into electrons, protons and oxygen and the dark-reactions which use the electrons and protons from the light reactions to ‘fix’ CO2 from the atmosphere into simple sugars that are the basis of the food chain. Importantly, the light reactions have a much higher capacity than the dark reactions resulting in much of the absorbed being wasted as heat rather than being used to ‘fix’ CO2.