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Category: food

Fewer insects, fewer nutritious crops: pollinator decline puts our health at risk

Discord announced that all voice and video calls through the communication platform are now protected by default with end-to-end encryption (E2EE).

The implementation was completed in March. Extensive at-scale testing has given Discord the confidence to formally announce the E2EE deployment now, and to start removing client code that supports unencrypted fallback.

Discord is a popular online platform that offers text chat, voice calls, video calls, livestreaming, and community servers for gaming, creators, businesses, and interest-based groups.

Tailored drinks could provide space nutrition

Researchers have developed customizable omega-3 nanoemulsion drinks to protect astronauts’ bones and muscles from space radiation. [ https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30563/tailored-drink…utrition-2](https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30563/tailored-drink…utrition-2)

How could customizable drinks help provide astronauts on future, long-term space missions with the proper levels of nutrition? This is what a recent study published in ACS Food Science & Technology hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated novel methods for improving future astronaut diets. This study has the potential to help scientists, mission planners, and astronauts develop improved dietary plans, specifically as space mission durations are aimed to increase in the coming years.

For the study, the researchers introduced beverage nanoemulsion drinks, with emulsion drinks being a common drink that typically consists of a blended mixture of two normally non-mixable substances like an oily substance and watery substance with microscopic droplets within the liquid since they don’t full mix together. In this case, the researchers propose nanoemulsion drinks with even smaller droplets and consist of water and Omega-3 fatty acids (fish oil), which provide bone and muscle protection against space radiation.

In the end, the researchers found that customizable drinks with a variety of sweetness levels and flavors are the best options. Going forward, the researchers aspire to test the tastiness of the beverages under microgravity conditions, as they note the drinks taste like typical flat sodas after carbonation loss.

Bioengineers condense protein engineering and testing to a single day

Proteins are critical to life—and to industry. There are countless proteins that could be engineered to treat and even cure serious diseases and cellular dysfunctions. Industrial applications are similarly promising, with proteins increasingly used as enzymes in food manufacturing and in consumer detergents.

While AI can help suggest improvements, each novel protein must still be created in the real world and tested for performance. It is a labor-intensive process that involves constructing the DNA instructions for each protein in yeast or bacteria and growing individual clones for protein production and testing. This can take many days for a single protein of interest and even longer if the protein needs to be tested in mammalian cells, a process that requires retrieving DNA from microbes for transfer to the mammalian cells.

In a new paper, Michael Z. Lin, a professor of neurobiology and of bioengineering in the schools of Engineering and Medicine, and graduate students, Yan Wu in bioengineering and Pengli Wang in chemical engineering, say they have condensed the time-intensive protein building and testing process to just 24 hours.

A fresh approach to peppermint: 250 new variants could boost flavor and fight disease

The genomics of peppermint are not as fresh as their flavor but scientists from the University of California, Davis, have found a way to breathe new genetic variation into the species. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help the mint industry develop new varieties of peppermint and provide a roadmap for improving clonal crops more generally.

Similar to strawberries, potatoes and many fruit trees, peppermint plants (Mentha × piperita) are reproduced asexually by a process called clonal propagation. In the case of peppermint, this means that their genomes have remained unaltered for more than 200 years. This lack of genetic variation leaves them susceptible to disease and means that properties such as yield and flavor have remained stagnant.

UC Davis plant biologists used radiation to induce mutations in the leading peppermint clone grown in the United States, resulting in more than 250 new and genetically distinct variants. Altogether, they introduced 1,406 large genetic mutations, which can now be used to identify key genes for breeding or selecting new and superior peppermint varieties.

A neuropeptide regulates cell non-autonomous protein homeostasis

FLP-17’s role in stress resistance aligns with its established functions. FLP-17 belongs to an evolutionarily conserved class, FMRF-amide/RF-amide neuropeptides, that plays important roles in energy balance and reproduction across phyla.34,35 In C. elegans, FLP-17 is secreted from a pair of sensory neurons (BAG) in response to low oxygen and high carbon dioxide, which can be caused by unfavorable food conditions or pathogens.36,37 FLP-17 then acts through specific neurons to inhibit egg laying and initiate an aversion behavior until the animal has reached more favorable conditions.30,36 Interestingly, unfavorable food conditions and pathogens also threaten organismal protein homeostasis.33,38 Therefore, we speculate that FLP-17 evolved to simultaneously protect the animal from proteotoxic stress while facilitating a behavioral program to help the animal navigate to more favorable conditions.

To coordinate adaptive behavioral and metabolic responses, FLP-17 primarily signals through the GPCR EGL-6 in specific neurons.30,31 Therefore, we tested whether EGL-6 also mediates FLP-17’s role in UPRER activation and found that FLP-17-induced activation of the UPRER and ER stress resistance is partially dependent on EGL-6. Egl-6 expression is predominantly neuronal, evidenced by transcriptional reporters and single-cell RNA-seq datasets.30,39 However, low levels of egl-6 expression were detected in intestine-specific translation of ribosome-affinity purification, which may better reflect protein levels.40 This suggests that FLP-17 may signal either through an intermediate cell type (such as a neuron) or directly to the intestine to activate UPRER.30,39 Furthermore, the partial dependence, combined with persistent stress gene activation in egl-6 (lof) backgrounds (Figure 5 E), indicates that additional unidentified receptors and mechanisms likely contribute to FLP-17 phenotypes.

Although FLP-17 was sufficient to activate the UPRER, it was not required for cell non-autonomous activation of the UPRER by glial:: xbp-1s, as flp-17 null mutants did not suppress glial:: xbp-1s phenotypes. This likely reflects neuropeptide network redundancy. Supporting this hypothesis, flp-17 (lof)) resulted in modest upregulation of stress response genes (Figure S3G) and a slight increase in hsp-4p::GFP in the glial:: xbp-1s animals (Figure 2D), suggesting compensatory activation of stress signaling pathways when FLP-17 is absent. This compensation could occur through multiple mechanisms. First, glial:: xbp-1s may induce multiple neuropeptides that provide functionally redundant UPRER activation. While no other candidate from our neuropeptidomics screen was individually sufficient to induce UPRER, we cannot exclude compensation by peptides not detected in our analysis, such as insulin-like peptides.

How Intestinal Aging Encourages Harmful Bacteria

In Aging Cell, researchers have elucidated the relationship between intestinal aging and age-related changes to the gut microbiome.

Two interdependent biologies

The human gut works through the interaction of two entirely different sets of cells. The first is the body’s actual cells, including the intestinal barrier between the gut and the rest of the body, various types of ordinary immune cells, and Peyer’s patches with follicle-associated epithelium (FAE) areas that contain microfold cells (M cells), which perform crucial immunoregulatory tasks [1]. The second is the gut microbiome, the various types of bacteria that help us digest food.

Scientists Say This Simple Supplement May Actually Reverse Heart Disease

Scientists in Japan say a common supplement may actually help “unclog” certain diseased heart arteries from the inside out.

A simple food supplement sold in Japan may have helped reverse a dangerous form of heart disease that often resists standard treatment, according to researchers at Osaka University. The findings, originally published in the European Heart Journal, continue to attract attention because they describe something rarely seen in cardiology: clogged heart arteries becoming noticeably clearer after a nutritional intervention rather than conventional cholesterol lowering alone.

Scientists target a hidden form of heart disease.

Digital therapy outperforms referrals to campus clinics among college students

College students with anxiety, depression and eating disorders may be more likely to start and to respond more positively to therapy offered via a digital app compared to referrals to in-person campus clinics, according to a study led by Penn State researchers and published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

Globally, an estimated 40% to 60% of college students experience a mental health disorder at some point, and the need for campus counseling services has increased faster than institutions’ capacity to provide these services, according to the researchers.

The research team wanted to see if a proactive intervention using a digital therapy app could effectively treat anxiety disorders, depression and eating disorders, as well as address the increased need for psychological services.

Harmless viruses trap Salmonella on flexible polymer in portable microfluidic sensor

Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) have developed a solid polymer coated with harmless viruses to detect the bacteria Salmonella enterica (S. enterica), an advance that could lead to new ways of finding contamination in the food supply. The work is published in the journal ACS Applied Bio Materials.

The group, led by Yuxiang “Shawn” Liu, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, reports that the technology can rapidly capture and visualize foodborne bacterial contaminants in tiny fluid samples. With no need for incubation or complicated equipment in research centers, the technology has the potential to be used as a rapid biosensor in field applications and in areas with few resources.

“We have a solid surface that can be used anywhere in the food supply chain, from farm to fridge, to detect foodborne bacteria with minimum human intervention,” Liu says.

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