Modelling a 10-mile circle near the University of Minnesota's Morris campus, ARS scientist Dave Archer estimated that harvesting 40 percent of corn stover for biofuel would raise soil erosion by only 0.25 tons per acre a year, and less with conservation practices.
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Sci-Tech
Science and technology from food, agriculture and nutrition research.
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Sci-Tech
Water Hardness Plays a Role in Removing Bacteria from Chicken Skin
USDA Agricultural Research Service scientists in Athens, Georgia compared very hard, moderately hard and soft water for rinsing broiler chicken skin. After five rinses, soft water removed up to 37 percent more bacteria, including Campylobacter and Staphylococcus, than the harder waters.
Sci-Tech
Iceberg lettuce goes healthier
USDA plant physiologist Steven Britz and colleagues shone ultraviolet LEDs on growing iceberg lettuce, prompting the leaves to build antioxidant polyphenolic compounds in their outer cells. After 43 hours the plants were noticeably redder, and redness rose with light intensity.
Sci-Tech
ARS preserves plants and animals for future needs
ARS screened tens of thousands of wheat and barley accessions from its National Small Grains Collection to find resistance to the Russian wheat aphid, and breeders used them to develop new varieties. The germplasm system shipped more than 182,800 plant samples worldwide in 2008.
Sci-Tech
New techniques developed for TSE testing
ARS chemist Eric Nicholson and veterinarian Robert Kunkle extracted abnormal prions from formalin-fixed tissue using mild detergent, freeze-boil cycles and enzyme digestion. Accuracy begins to decline two years after preservation and is gone by six.
Sci-Tech
Botulism Assay Quickly Detects Potent Foodborne Toxin
ARS biologist Larry Stanker and colleagues built monoclonal antibodies against serotype A botulinum toxin into an assay they say is 10 times more sensitive than the four-day mouse test, and are packaging it into a dipstick kit that works much like a home pregnancy test.
Sci-Tech
Food supplements that fortify fowl
ARS immunologist Hyun Lillehoj and colleagues found chickens fed ground green tea for two weeks before infection shed significantly fewer Eimeria maxima oocysts, and that diets with Pediococcus-based probiotics cut oocyte production and raised cytokine levels.
Sci-Tech
ARS investigate genes involved in forming plum pits
ARS scientists in Kearneysville, West Virginia found that genes for lignin production switch on sharply in plum pit tissue just before the stone hardens, then quiet down. Silencing them could yield a pitless plum; the team is working from Luther Burbank's early-1900s stoneless crosses.
Sci-Tech
Futuristic Seafood: Raising delicious cobia and pompano—Inland!
ARS researchers in Ft. Pierce, Florida are working out how to raise cobia and Florida pompano hundreds of miles inland in recirculating tanks. In one experiment, 2,400 juvenile pompano reached market size in water of just 5 parts per thousand salinity.
Sci-Tech
Nanotechnology may be used for food safety
ARS engineer Bosoon Park and University of Georgia colleagues built a nanoscale biosensor that attaches fluorescent dye particles to Salmonella antibodies so the bacteria light up and are easier to see. Park says it could be adapted to other foodborne pathogens.
Sci-Tech
Helping fruit fight back
ARS computational biologist Angela Baldo found 75 disease resistance gene markers in red raspberry, one of them linked to Phytophthora root rot, and helped identify 90 more in sweet and sour cherry cultivars. Most raspberry markers were unique to the fruit.
Sci-Tech
Studies reveal how plants Pprotect us from disease
ARS molecular biologist Daniel Hwang is tracing how phytochemicals from red wine, green tea, garlic, curcumin and cinnamon blunt inflammation. In cultured cells they interfered with signals from TLR and NOD proteins that would otherwise reach and activate inflammatory genes.
Sci-Tech
How carrots help us see the color orange
Max Planck researchers showed people familiar orange objects in an ambiguous yellow-orange hue, and those viewers later called that hue orange -- knowledge of the object apparently redrew the color boundary. Showing the same hues on objects that could be any color produced no such shift.
Sci-Tech
Tomato vaccine may prevent Alzheimer's disease?
Mice fed tomatoes engineered to carry beta-amyloid produced antibodies to the protein after a booster dose, Korean researchers report in Biotechnology Letters. They saw no reduction in existing brain plaques and call the transgenic-plant method a novel route to an oral vaccine.
Sci-Tech
Scientists Test Method for Sanitizing Leafy Produce
ARS food technologist Yaguang Luo reformulated a produce wash to outperform chlorine and, with University of Illinois colleagues, paired it with ultrasound. The combination cut E. coli on spinach by 4.5 logs, from about 300,000 colony-forming units to under 10.
Sci-Tech
New Zealand breeding program creates new red raspberry variety
New Zealand and Canadian breeders introduced 'Moutere', a floricane red raspberry named with the Maori word for island. Reported in HortScience, it produced high yields of large, uniform bright red early-season fruit in small plots in British Columbia and the Nelson region.
Sci-Tech
Increasing Iron Uptake in Infants
ARS and Cornell researchers blended freeze-dried chicken liver and beef into particles small enough to distribute evenly through infant cereal. In vitro, liver blended six minutes yielded more than twice the iron uptake of liver blended 60 seconds.
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