Discovery

Longer shelf life, better flavor, more nutritional value than canning or other forms of preserving food? It happens with a new technology developed by Dr. Juming Tang and his team at WSU. The process could revolutionize food preservation and lead the way to gourmet backpacker food, deluxe meals for astronauts, tasty MREs for soldiers, and longer-lasting food for humanitarian missions.

 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the process after more than a decade of research and testing by Tang’s team. As Howard Grimes, WSU vice president for research, says, the technology “promises significant advances in food safety and quality to benefit everyone.”

Read more at WSU Today and watch a video explaining the process: 

 

Washington State Magazine ran an article about early stages of Dr. Tang’s work in 2002.

Sometimes, figuring something out only deepens the overall mystery.

Take Pseudomonas fluorescens D7, for example.

Ann Kennedy, a USDA-Agricultural Research Service soil microbiologist at Washington State University, has isolated the native bacteria as a perfectly natural way to fight cheatgrass, also known as downy brome, scientific name Bromus tectorum. Recently, she and her colleagues were awarded a large grant to test the effectiveness of Pseudomonas fluorescens D7 on cheatgrass in rangeland.

Cheatgrass, which was introduced in the late 19th century as a forage crop, is an aggressive invader, a grass that has, according to botanist Washington State University Richard Mack, changed the ecology, if not the landscape, of much of the western United States. Cheatgrass crowds out other plants and changes the fire ecology of a region. Because it matures in early spring, it dries out and provides a hot-burning fuel for wildfires, to which its seeds are impervious.

The reason invasive species are so successful is they are out of context, out of their normal environment. Not all introduced plants are necessarily invasive. They may grow in a foreign environment, but not sufficiently well to crowd out native species. But if a plant does well in an environment and lacks native predators or enemies, then it can become aggressively invasive. Other very visible invasives in the Pacific Northwest are Scotch Broom and purple loosestrife. The reason they are so visible is they have no natural controls.

So it is with cheatgrass. Originally from Eastern Europe, it is not the problem there that it is here. In its native environment, it has no advantage over competitors and predators.

Kennedy and her colleagues imported soil from Turkey and Kazakhstan and found that 90 percent of the organisms in it were inhibitory to cheatgrass. Only 50 percent of organisms in domestic soil are inhibitory. (more…)

With swine flu so much in the news these days, it’s a good time to look back at a story Washington State Magazine ran in August of 2007 (”Contagion! Emerging diseases: Unraveling the mystery“). Washington State University has one of the best teams of researchers in the world devoted to the study of diseases that can pass from their usual animal hosts to humans, such as Salmonella and E. coli. Our story delved into what changes a  virus or bacterium has to go through before it can infect people, why pigs are so often a way station for “bugs” that eventually infect people, why these diseases seem to occur in bursts, and why some outbreaks become full-blown epidemics.

If you enjoyed reading my WSM story on memory, check out this article from Monday’s New York Times. It gets into one of the deepest questions about memory, which is, how and when does the brain select which memories to keep and which to discard? We take in far more information every day than we can remember, and since our brains are of finite size, they can’t retain a record of everything.

The memories with the greatest staying power, says WSU psychologist Jay Wright, are those that are important to us personally, especially those with a strong emotional element. Such memories seem to be engraved so deeply in our minds that we can vividly recall a moment that occurred decades ago, even if we haven’t thought about it for years.

But scientists don’t know how that happens. The brain records many things in short-term memory but only a few make it into long-term storage. The hypothesis is that the brain has a mechanism to strengthen the synapses, or active connections between nerve cells, that encode memories that the brain deems to be worth keeping longer.

The work described in the NYT article is a big step in understanding that process. Researchers at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, working with rats, have identified a protein that accumulates in heavily-used nerve endings, those that receive a lot of input from other neurons. The protein probably has something to do with stabilizing those synapses and creating long-term memories, because the scientists have also found that a drug that interferes with the protein destroys the memory of something the rats had learned weeks or months ago.

(more…)