Mining molecular gastronomydieter Heinemann/Westend61/Corbisshrimp and tomato are paired often together in North american cuisine, because they share certain flavour compounds.
Ahnert, himself an amateur molecular gastronomist, was intrigued by the anecdotal suggestion that the reason some foods go well together is
and two American online recipe databases, grouping recipes into North american, Western European, Latin american, Southern European or East Asian cuisine.
For example, the North american dish shrimp scampi and tomato broil has a recipe where the two main ingredients (shrimp
and the mozzarella, parmesan and tomato used in the recipe all share 4-methylpentanoic acid.
The team also found that some common ingredients in North american recipes milk, butter, cocoa, vanilla, cream and eggs,
for example share flavour compounds with many other foods. Once these foods were removed from the analysis
the extent of flavour sharing dropped away. Conversely, in East Asian cooking, when the team removed the most common ingredients that shared the least flavour compounds (beef, ginger, pork, cayenne, chicken and onion) from the analysis,
the flavour sharing in the remaining ingredients increased. These findings point to something else at play in Asian cuisines that hasn t yet been identified,
says Ahnert.""It s clearly something different from shared compounds, he says.""To get a clearer idea of
what s going on I want to look at better data on flavour compounds. He has contacted therefore the owners of professional databanks to find out how much of each flavour compound is present in an ingredient.
and flavour-based cooking has become popular in recent years, says Roque, who adds that both studies highlight the utility of network analysis in fields that wouldn t traditionally use such methods.
As for the non-matching flavours of Asian cuisines, to unpick that will require more work."
and to the kitchen, where he is keen to try the flavour combinations that arose during his analysis. In particular he wants to combine coffee and garlic.
however, for coffee shops to start offering a garlic shot with their cappuccinos
Seven days: 9 15 december 2011gene-therapy boost A gene therapy treatment for patients with the blood-clotting disorder haemophilia B has scored its first unequivocal success,
the treatment uses viruses to deliver a healthy version of the gene to patients'liver cells.
Pill politics In a surprise move, the US Secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, has overruled the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and denied girls under 17 access to the emergency contraceptive levonorgestrel known as the morning-after pill,
but"is a step forward, especially given Brazil s need to regulate food production and avoid deforestation.
 The first Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA), published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs (Defra), examines 100 potential consequences of climate change for the United kingdom. The study
laying the groundwork for a biofuel that doesn't sacrifice food crops. Yasuo Yoshikuni and his colleagues at the Bio Architecture Lab in Berkeley, California, engineered the bacterium Escherichia coli
Many researchers are exploring ways to produce ethanol without using food crops such as sugar cane or maize (corn),
or maize not only detracts from food supplies, but also takes up huge areas of arable land.
Seaweed produces four kinds of sugars laminarin, mannitol, alginate and cellulose. The biggest fraction in brown seaweed is alginate,
which could then digest the alginate into simple sugars. The team also engineered the strain
so that it could convert those sugars into ethanol, enabling the direct production of ethanol from brown seaweed.
The main challenge in biofuels is not the ability to degrade complex carbohydrates and turn them into simple sugars,
but only produce several thousand tonnes a year for food. Biofuel production would require billions of tonnes."
biomass stoves, brick kilns and coke ovens. Other measures would reduce the burning of agricultural waste
Antibiotic ban The US Food and Drug Administration is restricting some uses of a major class of antibiotic in farm animals,
chickens and turkeys a ban that it had ordered already in 2008, but revoked after protests from farmers,
Rules tighten on use of antibiotics on farmsthe US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is now moving to protect key antibiotics known as cephalosporins,
On 4 Â January, the agency said that it would prohibit certain uses of cephalosporins in farm animals including cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys,
restrict veterinary surgeons to using the two cephalosporin drugs specifically approved for food-producing animals ceftiofur and cephapirin and ban prophylactic use.
In animals not listed in the FDA order, such as ducks or rabbits, vets will have more discretion to use the drugs.
Beef producers have been alarmed particularly that the 2010 assessment put the cumulative risk of foot-and-mouth disease escaping from the NBAF over the facility s projected 50-year lifespan at 70%(see Fear factor.
a retired KSU biophysicist who helps to lead a group called No NBAF in Kansas. The group says that a facility that works on highly infectious animal diseases does not belong"in the centre of the food-animal health corridor.
whether to introduce crop-specific indirect land-use change (ILUC) factors that recognize the extra emissions that plant feedstocks cause by displacing food crops,
According to most scientific studies including one by the International Food Policy Research Institute in WASHINGTON DC used by the European commission to prepare an impact assessment and legislation biodiesel from palm oil,
BUSINESS Biosimilars rules Drug-makers keen to sell generic forms of branded biological drugs such as enzymes and antibodies were excited to finally see draft guidance on the matter emerge from the US Food and Drug
Synbio troubles US synthetic biology firm Amyris which engineers microbes to process plant sugars into useful chemicals saw its share price plunge by 28%on 10 february,
and modern markets for food and other forest products, he says
A whiff of interstellar clouda NASA spacecraft has detected directly atoms from outside the boundary of the Solar system
threatening the food security and livelihoods of local populations by denying them access to their traditional lands and food sources4.
The company has expanded also to Uganda, Tanzania and southern Sudan. A Dutch firm s carbon-offset project in Uganda s Mount Elgon National park became unmarketable after sustained conflict with local farmers who contest the group's right to the land.
Large-scale acquisitions have increased since global food and oil crises in 2007. Many economists thought that the pressure would ease eventually
The growing middle class, especially in Asia, is hungry for food, oil and minerals. Africa is most at risk
'which bring multinational companies such as beverage firm Pepsico, agricultural biotech giant Monsanto and retailer Walmart together with producers and environmentalists to negotiate environmental certification standards for products such as soya beans, palm oil,
sugar cane and beef. These standards focus on everything from soil management to workers'rights, and include limits on deforestation.
soya and palm oil could have the greatest impact on carbon (see'Food versus forests').'With more than US$4 million in seed money from Norway, the consortium plans to announce an initial round of projects in the run-up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de janeiro (Rio+20) in Brazil in June.
but consumers and environmentalists have contributed also by pressuring major food suppliers to sign moratoria on the purchase of soya and beef from recently cleared land.
Nonetheless, even advocates acknowledge that it is difficult to achieve consensus on environmental standards in a room of producers, major food companies and environmentalists, all with competing agendas.
which has been working with Swiss food company Nestlã and the world's second-largest palm-oil producer, Golden Agri-Resources in Indonesia,
Moreover, the pork industry often doesn t want the negative image of having swine flu detected in its farms.
which tends to focus on food security, and the OIE, which looks mostly at animal health and trade.
If farming had spread solely as a cultural process, we would not expect to see a farmer in the north with such genetic affinity to southern populations,
says that one farmer from Scandinavia is certainly not enough to explain the spread of farming in places like Spain
which make up the lion s share of the food consumed around the world. Cereals and vegetables need lots of nitrogen to grow,
delivering key nutrients such as nitrogen when the crops need it most. Organic approaches such as laying crop residue on the soil surface,
build up nutrients over a longer period of time.""There is not the synchrony between supply of nutrients and crop demand, says Andrew Macdonald, a soil scientist at Rothamsted Research, an agricultural-science institute in Harpenden, UK.
Organic approaches fare better when producing fruits such as strawberries which have yields only 3%lower than in conventional farming and oilseed crops such as soybean,
Prompted by research published this week2 showing that the bloodsuckers can store DNA from their meals for several months,
including the Truong Son muntjac deer (Muntiacus truongsonensis) and the Annamite striped rabbit (Nesolagus timinsi),
W. Kolvoort/naturepl. combloodsuckers feast on the forest s rare delicacies.""It is a very easy way to get a snapshot of
The Vietnam field trial suggests that leeches preserve DNA from only their most recent blood meal so an animal s range is likely to include the location where the leech was found.
In the Molecular Ecology special issue, various research teams worked out the diet of a leopard by sequencing DNA in its faeces3;
Researchers refer to environmental DNA studies as meta-bar-coding, because they rely on DNA bar codes:
short DNA sequences that uniquely identify a species. Bar-coding makes it possible to distinguish between two species of butterfly, for example,
and existing bar-coding databases tend to contain the longer stretches that were identified with old DNA sequencing technologies.
including powders, tablets and teas. Focusing on DNA from chloroplasts and mitochondria energy-producing structures in cells that have their own genomes the researchers produced 49,000 genetic sequences.
including a poisonous herb called Ephedra and the woody vine Aristolochia. Sometimes known as birthwort, Aristolochia  contains aristolochic acid,
which can cause kidney and liver damage and bladder cancer. Medicinal use of the herb probably explains high rates of bladder cancer in Taiwan,
according to a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences2. At least one of the four medicines that contained Aristolochia DNA also contained aristolochic acid.
Bunce thinks that food and drug regulatory agencies should consider adopting deep-sequencing techniques to screen herbal medicines;
Monkey genetics track social statusimagebroker/FLPAGROOMING is one way in which rhesus macaques show deference and curry favour.
judged by the access they got to food, water and grooming. The researchers divided the monkeys into ten new groups, where their social ranks changed.
Cooking makes food easier to chew and digest, so the first humans to adopt it could get more energy from the same amount of food
and spend less time foraging. But it has proved difficult to work out when humans made this leap.
that would support an early-cooking hypothesis, but we are not there yet. The earliest unequivocal evidence for regular human cooking dates back 400,000 years4.
Paola Villa, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural history in Boulder, argues that further searches are needed."
and carbon-storage potential than others, says William Laurance, a forest-conservation scientist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.
Tomato genome sequence bears fruitthe genome sequence of one of the world s highest-value salad plants the tomato has been decoded by an international team of scientists,
According to the leaders of the UK arm of the Tomato Genome Consortium, Graham Seymour at the University of Nottingham and Gerard Bishop, formerly of Imperial College London,
such as aubergines (Solanum melongena) and peppers (Capsicum spp..They also hope it will help in the development of tomatoes that can survive pests, pathogens and even climate change,
and a lead researcher on the project, explains that the group started out using traditional tools to sequence the genomes of the domesticated tomato cultivar Heinz 1706 (the one used to make the famous ketchup) and its closest wild relative, Solanum pimpinellifolium.
UK,"is to link this genome sequence to traits that are useful and important, especially for food security and human health
Bovine TB disguised by liver flukebovine tuberculosis (btb) could be spreading across Britain because the most widely used test for the disease is ineffective
when cattle are infected with a common liver parasite. The liver fluke Fasciola hepatica was known already to affect the standard skin test for btb,
But the Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs, which is responsible for btb control in Britain,
when they were infected with liver fluke2. The United states, Canada and Australia have eradicated btb, but Britain and Ireland have struggled to control it.
War on weeds loses groundwith its jumble of leaves and pointy, green, flower spikes, the plant known as pigweed or palmer amaranth (Amaranthus palmeri) isn t much to look at.
But health officials fear that the spread of insecticide-resistant mosquitoes could bring about a resurgence of the disease.
Switzerland, issued a strategic plan to curb the spread of resistance.""We don t want to wait for failures to happen,
the report urges that a global database be set up to track the spread of resistance,
Canadian company Iogen Energy in Ottawa announced on 30 april that it has shelved plans to build a large-scale facility in Manitoba to produce fuel ethanol from cellulose, the long molecular chain of sugars that forms
Most fuel ethanol is made by fermenting the sugars in grains or sugar cane, but cellulosic ethanol can be made from municipal waste, wood chips, grass,
and the stalks, leaves and stems of food crops. It is seen as a more sustainable biofuel
because it does not divert food from dinner tables to biorefineries. But cracking apart the tough cellulose molecules is a lot harder than brewing up simple sugars.
Cracking stuffiogen opened the world s first demonstration plant for producing cellulosic ethanol in Ottawa in 2004.
while the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) works out how to regulate them. Exemplar Genetics
As early as 1999, the FDA spoke about the promise of GE animals for both food and pharmaceutical purposes.
however, FDA approvals for two GE food animals have stalled: a salmon with a gene prompting faster growth,
whether they re bred to produce food, drugs or, in Swart s case, disease.""The NAD process doesn t fit us real well,
US$5-billion agricultural research portfolio unveiledthe CGIAR is a global network of research centres working to help foster food security, poverty reduction,
and improving nutrition and diets. Frank Rijsberman, the new chief executive officer of the CGIAR consortium, said that the organization had made a deliberate decision to shift its strategy to focus on outcome-driven research.
derives from a 2010 International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) report, which concluded that significant annual investment would be required to ensure food security through to 2050.
Funding will be provided by the governments of 60 countries, and organizations including the World bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
and spread of the gene variants needed for the adult population to digest the lactose found in milk,
He suggests that making yoghurt may have made dairy products more digestible. The Nature podacst team talks to Richard Evershed about finding 7, 000 year old milk in clay jars."
whether the animals were kept for meat, dairying or other uses. Evershed and Dunne hoped to overcome these problems by examining fat residues left on the pottery shards.
Of those 29, at least half contained fats came from dairy foods. Carbon isotopes from milk fat can also point to the sorts of food the dairy animals ate
as different plants incorporate varying amounts of carbon-13 relative to carbon-12. The team found that the milk fats came from a range of plants,
000 years ago in Europe and later spread to Africa could have offered a unique benefit in a parching climate.
and then when we sell the soy
Risk assessment of US agro-biosafety lab found wantingan independent panel reviewing the dangers associated with establishing a high-security laboratory for studying animal diseases in the heart of US cattle country has found that the government
Manney sees zoonotic diseases those that can spread to humans as posing an even greater source of risk and uncertainty.
she removed many of the bill s contentious provisions, including one that would have granted effectively an amnesty for any illegal deforestation conducted before July 2008.
"Now we are in the middle of this mess, and I don t think it is going to end soon.
and enforcement agencies or whether it will sow doubts and ambiguities that may undercut compliance.
That seems unlikely at the moment, says Maximo Torero, a food-market and trade analyst at the International Food Policy Research Institute in WASHINGTON DC.
Researchers are investigating how certain crop varieties including sorghum and pearl millet which originated in Africa are able to withstand heat
There has already been some success with sorghum, which has shown improved productivity in drought conditions that occur late in the growing season in temperate and tropical environments,
The seed company Pioneer hi-bred in Johnston, Iowa, last year commercialized a conventionally bred drought-tolerant hybrid variety,
the US Food and Drug Administration on 17 Â July gave the green light to a second obesity treatment:
when handlers discovered eggs in the enclosure he shared with two females, but the eggs were found to be unfertilized2.
On 24 Â June this year Fausto Llerena, a ranger at the Galapagos National park and George s long-term keeper, found him slumped in his corral.
Food science deserves a place at the tablealthough it typically commands less attention than many areas of government-funded research,
A key component of this spending is the $705 million allocated to the US National Institute of Food
The public perception is of small-town universities just doing meat-and-potatoes production agriculture. But we have some of the top agricultural-science universities in the world.
informatics, nanotechnology, biotechnology and food safety, in addition to developing better ways to feed the world. Agricultural scientists believe it
In this country, we take food and agriculture for granted. The average American spends only nine cents per dollar on food.
In India and China, the average person spends about one-third of their income on food.
Suddenly it becomes part of your consciousness. It is in your conversations every day. You go to other countries,
if we don t worry about food and agriculture education too. We should consider adding an A
Kids should know where food comes from, why it is important to think about the kind of food that we eat
and not gorge ourselves on calories, and so on. A lot of health problems are attributable to people not knowing about food.
Of course other factors are involved, but at the end of the day, education is where it s at. My number-one priority is going to be conversations with stakeholders everybody from average citizens to farmers, ranchers, scientists and people from the private sector and university faculties.
and food security, adapting to climate change, energy, water, nutrition, and food safety. Â Â Â Luckily for us, in the past couple of years NIFA has received actually a little bit more funding, especially in the competitive-grants arena.
I hope that we continue on a trajectory to increase competitive grant funds that is commensurate with the challenges NIFA addresses includi food
and livestock provide ripe conditions for endemic zoonotic diseases to arise and spread, the study says.
Demand for livestock products such as meat and milk is rising across the globe and could offer poor farmers a route out of poverty as markets expand,
reducing milk and meat production in cattle by 8%.In addition, 27%of livestock in developing countries showed signs of current
or past infection with bacterial food-borne disease. The latest research will help direct efforts
Obesity pill The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new weight-loss drug on 27 june
California, suppresses food cravings by mimicking the effects of serotonin in the brain. The agency rejected the drug two years ago because of safety concerns,
Palm-oil boom raises conservation concernspalm oil was touted once as a social and environmental panacea a sustainable food crop,
says William Laurance, a forest-conservation scientist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia. Indonesia, the world s largest grower of oil palms (see Palm sprouts),
Such expansion is driven by the steadily rising demand for palm oil, mainly from the food sector,
including margarine and biscuits. But the emerging biodiesel market is also thirsty for the oil.
which they define as the difference between attainable and actual yields of food crops. Assembling the most comprehensive global data set of crop yields
the study authors show that yield increases of 45-70%are possible for most crops through improved nutrient management
"Our study adds to growing evidence that we can increase food production and improve the environment by doing nothing more than being smart.
The spread of the disease comes with a heavy economic toll last year, the Russian Federation lost 300,000 of the country s 19 million pigs to swine fever, at an estimated cost of about 7. 6  billion  roubles (US$240  million).
and European and Asian countries are on the alert to deal with outbreaks that could cost their pork industries billions of dollars.
In 1957, the virus jumped to Portugal after pigs near Lisbon s airport were fed infected human food scraps (the virus particles can survive meat curing processes.
and import of the region s ham including the coveted jam  n ibã rico was banned by many countries,
C. Netherton/OIETHE recent spread of the virus means that the Ukrainian outbreak, now under control after authorities culled 208 pigs
But agencies such as the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural affairs in London are nevertheless watching the situation closely."
The pigs food can also carry the virus if it includes contaminated pork products. Swill feeding, in which pigs are fed scraps of human food waste,
is popular among small-scale farmers. Limiting this practice (which is banned in the European union) or heat-sterilizing the food scraps can prevent disease transmission,
says Dixon."I remember being taken to a little backyard farm near Nairobi, and that farmer was doing everything correctly.
He had a cooker with a big pan of entrails that he was feeding to pigs
The FAO warns that continued spread of African swine fever could be very costly Russia does not export its pork,
and quarantine that could disrupt Russia s billion-dollar pork industry. Meanwhile, backyard farmers often do not report suspected cases for fear of losing their livelihood."
and relied on livestock for food and income. While animal health officials focus on containing the spread of African swine fever,
scientists believe that it should be possible to develop a vaccine to eradicate the disease.
Companies set to fight food-label plansource: California Secretary of Statethose in favour of labelling argue that the public has the right to know what is in their food,
citing food safety concerns and a general mistrust of corporate interests in agriculture. Opponents say that the labels will be perceived as warnings,
stoking consumer hostility to genetic engineering. They also argue that the move would raise food costs,
and expose grocers, farmers and food manufacturers to frivolous lawsuits for incorrect labelling. Similar labelling proposals have failed in other states,
but a victory in California could set a national precedent.""If the ballot initiative passes, it would mark a turning point for public activism in the United states,
and food manufacturers Coca-cola, Pepsico and Nestlã have contributed each more than $1 Â million to the campaign;
or the quantity of GM ingredients in a food. Meat from animals fed on GM CROPS would not need to be labelled.
Bob Goldberg, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Los angeles, says the proposition is"anti-science,
and could discourage research to develop drought-tolerant crops and more nutritious foods. Studies by the US National Academies1 and Britain s Royal Society of Medicine2 found no evidence that biotech crops are unsafe to eat.
in June, the American Medical Association said that there was no scientific reason to label GM foods,
the labelling could support health studies by helping to track people s food choices. Pro-GM plant scientists also point out that the crops can benefit the environment by enabling farmers to use less-toxic herbicides
which depends on food availability, for example. But those studies failed to account for the synergistic effects of habitat loss, fires, urban expansion and hunting on the fragmented forests.
and sent food prices soaring. The Food and agriculture organization of the united nations has suggested that the United states suspend biofuel production from maize,
The oil currently makes up over 80%of all vegetable oils used in European biofuels. However, a study published last month one of the most detailed so far attempted to replicate the commission's calculations
such as loss of food production as land is made available to grow biofuels. If these changes were taken into account,
Gene-test regulation Personal-genetics company 23andme announced on 30 Â July that it was seeking approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its genetic tests related to health
Missouri, argued that Dupont s agriculture subsidiary Pioneer hi-bred (now Dupont Pioneer) in Johnston, Iowa, infringed a Monsanto patent on Roundup Ready crops,
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