Apparently, where you grow these mushrooms has an impact on what chemicals they contain. (Remember; it isn't just humans who are what they eat!). The researchers from the Agricultural Research Service in Arkansas grew shiitakes on oak logs and on commercial substrates and discovered that they produced more of the good chemicals on the logs.
Logs used in shiitake production generally provide good yields for around two to three years. Larger shiitake farms may have 3,000 or more logs on the premises, and retire around 1,000 of them every year.
The researchers also did some work with the 'retired' logs. They chipped a selection of spent logs, added urea and green grass cuttings to the chips and then composted the mixture. They then added the log compost to the soil in a greenhouse spinach production system and found that the seedlings exhibited greater growth rates than seedlings cultivated in soil without the log compost.
Apparently, shiitake mushrooms aren't just good for humans!
Our next food may not be as good for us as shiitake mushrooms, but it's a whole lot more important to our lives than these obscure fungi. In fact there are those who will tell you that it's the most important food on the planet. Corn? Rice? Wheat?? Beef?? Chicken?? Nope, not even close. Researchers are racing to save . . . chocolate!
SOC!!! (SAVE OUR CHOCOLATE!)
During the past 15 years, the global cocoa industry has confronted a trio of devastating fungal diseases that cost growers an estimated $700 million in losses annually. Now scientists at the Agricultural Research Service in Florida are developing productive cacao (Theobroma cacao) trees resistant to these diseases: witches' broom, frosty pod and black pod.
Field trials are underway in South America, West Africa, Central America and Papua New Guinea to find and evaluate potential disease-resistant cocoa trees. Several of these tree selections were based on disease-tolerance genes discovered in Miami.
Since 1999, ARS researchers have worked in partnership with Mars Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of chocolate-related products, to apply modern molecular genetic techniques to cocoa production. Mars Inc. has now combined resources with IBM to sequence the entire cacao genome. (I guess the guys at IBM like chocolate too!) Once completed, the research results will be released into the public domain.
| The partnership to sequence the cacao genome is financially backed and coordinated by Mars Inc. Scientific support is provided by the Agriculture Research Service (a scientific research agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture) in collaboration with scientists at IBM. The IBM team will use its Blue Gene supercomputer to analyze the cocoa genome. This is the first time that all three research groups are collaborating. |
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And now on to another little problem with a favorite food. It all about what happens when the chips are brown!
BET YOU CAN EAT JUST ONE
Dr. Don Henne isn't wasting his degree when he's standing by the deep fryer waiting for potato slices to turn brown. He's conducting research that will help the potato industry and all you people out there that eat potato chips. He's trying to solve the mystery of zebra chip, the latest disease to plague the potato industry.
Zebra chip is a disease that raises the sugar levels of potatoes. When the potato is sliced and fried for potato chips, the sugar caramelizes and turns the chip brown, while giving it an off taste and burnt appearance. Zebra chip won't hurt you, but I bet you've noticed those chips in the package and after a while you toss them in the trash can.
Zebra chip first appeared in Mexico and Guatemala six or seven years ago. It has been found in potato fields through South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley and has spread north into the South Plains and Panhandle regions of Texas.
Infected plants have curled leaves and stunted growth, and their tubers exhibit a brown striped or mottled pattern when sliced. Scientists around the country are trying to identify both the insect that transmits the pathogen and the bacteria that actually cause the disease.
| There is no adequate control for the insect or the disease at this time. There are other diseases that have similar symptoms as zebra chip and one of the challenges is being able to correctly identify diseased plants in the field. When they find plants that appear to be infected, they take the potatoes back to the lab where they slice and fry them to make the final determination of infection. |
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So the next time you find potato chips in your bag that look like the ones on the left, you'll know why they look that way and that there are scientists who will fry potatoes today to help your personal bag be zebra chip free!!
TOO HOT TO HANDLE
If everything you eat is doused with Tabasco and finadene, you owe a lot to bugs, both the crawling kind and ones you can see only with a microscope. New research shows that the bugs are responsible for the heat in chili peppers.
It turns out the spiciness is a defense mechanism that some peppers develop to kill a microscopic fungus that invades the chili pepper through punctures made in the outer skin by insects. The fungus, from a large genus called Fusarium, destroys the plant's seeds before they can be eaten by birds and widely distributed.
For wild chilies, the biggest danger to the seed comes before dispersal, when a large number are killed by this fungus. Both the fungus and the birds eat chilies, but the fungus never disperses the seeds - it just kills them.
The chili peppers contain sugar and fat. This attracts birds that eat the peppers and scatter the freshly fertilized seeds. But insects and fungi enjoy sugar and fat too, and together they can destroy the chili pepper's seeds.
However, the researchers found that the heat of hot chilies acts as a unique defense mechanism. The pungency comes from capsaicinoids, the same chemicals that protect them from fungal attack by dramatically slowing microbial growth.
Capsaicin doesn't stop seed dispersal because birds don't sense the pain and continue to eat peppers, but the fungus that kills pepper seeds is quite sensitive to this chemical.
The scientists collected chilies from seven different populations of the same pepper species spread across 1,000 square miles in Bolivia. In each population, they randomly selected peppers and counted scars on the outer skin from insect foraging. The damage was caused by hemipteran insects that have sucking mouth parts arranged into a beaklike structure that can pierce the skin of a fruit.
The researchers found that not all wild chili plants produce capsaicinoids, so that in the same area, fruit on one plant could be hotter than a jalapeņo while fruit from other plants might be as mild as a bell pepper. But they discovered there was a much higher frequency of hot chilies in areas with larger populations of hemipteran insects that attack the chilies and leave them more vulnerable to fungus.
| The fact that chilies have capsaicin could be the reason humans started eating hot peppers in the first place. In the days before refrigeration, if you lived in a warm and humid climate, eating could be downright dangerous because virtually everything was packed with microbes, many of them harmful. People probably added chilies to their stews because spicy stews were less likely to kill them. |
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