CABI Blogs: hand picked... and carefully sorted

A word to the wise (Aspergillosis)

As I accidentally breathed in the blood, fish & bone powder I was feeding my plants yesterday, I was reminded of a case which made the front cover of The Lancet last week entitled: gardening can seriously damage your health.

It highlighted a case report of an unfortunate man who succumbed to aspergillosis, a fungal disease. He acquired this through breathing in the spores & he did that because he had spread a large amount of rotting tree and plant mulch upon his garden which generated clouds of dust, engulfing him. Treated initially for pneumonia, it was unfortunate that his partner didn't recall this dust cloud until three days into his hospital stay: by then his sputum samples had grown the fungus Aspergillus fumigatus. Apparently his symptoms started within 24 hours of spreading the mulch. Anti-fungal Amphotericin was immediately started but the infection overwhelmed him and he died just 5.5 days after entering hospital and just 12 days after the first signs of breathing distress.

This happened in High Wycombe, a town near me! I hope this mulch wasn't commercially available.

Aspergillosis and some other fungal infections (cryptosporidium, candida (yeast), coccidiomycosis, fusarium) are, in developed countries, usually opportunistic infections, mainly affecting the immune suppressed (through drug treatment or sometimes genetic makeup). AS we use more immunosuppressive drugs, so they are becoming a problem in hospitals. (It is not known if this unfortunate man had a defect in his immune system.) Of course in the general population, many have had experience of one of the dermatophytes, they aren't killers but who wants ringworm or athletes foot.

From cats to sea otters, whales and maybe even humans

You may already have read, in one of the many magazines, news services and blogs that have picked up this story (see here, for example), about some findings presented the other week at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, and more recently at the annual meeting of the Pacific division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It is suggested that the parasite Toxoplasma gondii is spread to marine mammals by anchovies. It appears that the research has not yet been formally published in a journal, but searching the CAB Abstracts database and the Internet revealed some more information about the background to the study.

Whales - wanted dead or alive?

Whales are featuring heavily in science and environmental news at the moment, as the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission proceeds in Santiago, Chile. As always, feelings have been running high in both the pro- and anti-whaling camps. In the first vote of the meeting, Greenland has been denied the right to catch 10 humpback whales. A Greenland delegate said the decision would deprive its indigenous Inuit communities of much needed whale meat, while a Caribbean delegate from St Kitts and Nevis also said that the vote was "depriving marginal peoples of the right to eat.

Did you ask for a glass of wine…?

A glass of wine calls for romance, sophistication and pleasure…the unravelling of complex flavours in the mouth. Yes, a simple glass of wine might elevate us from our daily stresses into higher states of mind allowing for a cheerful and relaxed mood to arise instead.

Imagine you are getting home after one of those days, you head for the wine holder and take a bottle from there, you are then ready to get into the ceremony of wine opening, getting the glasses in line…By the way, would you prefer your bottle to be sealed with a traditional cork, a plastic stopper or a screw cap?

Well, I guess for some of us it will not make a huge amount of difference. For most of us, however, it still does and that is so incredibly positive!

Living on the edge - A kind of madness!!!

Although we’re enjoying and praising the few sunny days we’ve been experiencing, in Oxfordshire lately, some of us will still remember the downpour and flooding, we experienced recently and, even more recently, in Illinois, USA. I for one remember being a mix of excited and scared about driving through the river which suddenly appeared on my way home through Oxfordshire one day recently. I was lucky enough that my car got through it but further along there was another which didn’t and had to be dragged out by a tractor.

   

This isn't my car but a good representation of what it was like

Although flooding has been happening more often recently, which we put down to global warming; flooding is a natural process which helps to enrich soils around rivers and to maintain the diversity of wildlife and habitats. Traditionally, we have tended to live and build near water sources. However, in view of climate change, developments of housings on floodplain is not only unjustifiable, but ‘a kind of madness’ according to Nick Reeves in his CIWEM article1.  He argued that development on flood plains reduces the capacity of rivers to transport, store and absorb flood waters. And what are we or, more precisely, the authorities doing about it?

Will the world fight poverty and eradicate hunger?

The FAO Summit on World Food Security-2008, held at Rome from the 3-5 of June, represented an opportunity for the world leaders to discuss high food prices, climate change and bioenergy.
Solutions to the “food crisis” focused on the increase in land productivity through the use of traditional breeding lines and GMOs.  While biotech crops have already taken off in Brazil, Argentina and China, it seems that the steady resistance to GMO technology in Europe and Africa might be now easing due to the recent swell in food prices.

Getting married? Got butterflies?

While awareness of invasive species and the impact they have on the natural environment is a hot topic, I recently read an article, on a warm and related topic if you will, about butterfly releases at weddings: ‘Are butterfly releases at weddings a conservation concern or opportunity?’ by T. R. New. And it got me thinking.

Google Earth: Disappearing Forests

Most people who work at CABI know that I am a bit of a geek, especially when it comes to statistics and data visualisation, but now even more so since the release of the Google Earth API and thematic mapping. Anyway, back to the point, I was doing a search for new "environmental science" projects and layers that are being produced for/using Google Earth data, when I came across these wonderful 3D visualisations at the Google Earth Outreach.

The layer that interested the inner geek was "Disappearing Forests". This data layer shows the state of forests around the world by using polygons to represent rates of deforestation. It includes country profiles, providing high quality information in the placement balloons.

Forests in Flux

Forests play an integral role in the Earth's climate, and each forest type - tropical, temperate and boreal - has varying impacts on the climate, serving to both cool and warm the Earth. Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation.

Last Friday Science published their special issue entitled ‘Forests in Flux’. The issue focuses on the future of the world's forests in light of unprecedented change, largely resulting either directly or indirectly from intensifying human activity. Amongst the News reports, Perspectives articles and online podcast and video, a Review article caught my eye which explains how forests influence climate through physical, chemical, and biological processes.

‘Forests and Climate Change: Forcings, Feedbacks, and the Climate Benefits of Forests’, by Gordon Bonan of the National Science Foundation's National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, presents the current state of understanding for how forests impact global climate and emphasises the importance of gaining a better understanding of these influences as forests become more central in global warming mitigation policies - "Forests have been proposed as a possible solution, so it is imperative that we understand fully how forests influence climate."

The taste of deliciousness

Taste was the theme of the 5th Tomato Conference held in the Netherlands.

Most of us would identify salty, sweet, sour and bitter as tastes, but may be unaware of the fifth basic taste: umami. Described by Dr Kikunae Ikeda of the Tokyo Imperial University 100 years ago, umami is a dominant flavour in meat and other foods such as cheese, mushrooms …and tomatoes. Otherwise described as savouriness, succulence or 'deliciousness', umami is due mainly to monosodium glutamate (adenosine monophosphate and glutamate in tomatoes). When mixed, umami compounds appear to behave synergistically, which explains why meat and tomatoes are often cooked together. Tomatoes, which are relatively high in glutamate, enhance the savoury, meaty flavour of meat.

Chemical analyses of tomato flavour by Don Mottram's team at the University of Reading have shown differences in concentrations of umami compounds in different tomato varieties, and an interesting piece of work carried out in response to a request by celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal (renowned for his acute sense of taste) showed much higher levels (up to 10- to- 12-fold) of umami compounds in the centre (pulp and seeds) than in the outer flesh of tomatoes (1). The results confirmed the differences in strength of umami taste between the outer flesh and the centre which the chef had perceived. Think twice before you discard the seeds!

The conference was all about taste - so of course there had to be a tasting session. We all had to choose which wine we preferred with various different types of tomato. The results corroborated the interesting theory that northern Europeans like harmony in taste (a dry, slightly acid wine with a sharp tomato) whereas southern Europeans prefer contrast (a sweet wine with a sharp tomato, and a dry wine with a sweet tomato). The tasting didn't end there - the chef had to meet the challenging task of preparing a 3-course meal based on tomatoes - which ended with tomato ice cream (delicious??!)

Search the CAB Abstracts database for hundreds of records on research into tomato taste and flavour and how this can be improved.
 

1. Oruna-Concha, M. J.; Methven, L.; Blumenthal, H.; Young, C.; Mottram, D. S. (2007) Differences in glutamic acid and 5´-ribonucleotide contents between flesh and pulp of tomatoes and the relationship with umami taste. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 55(14) 5776-5780