May 28, 2011 Çeşme, Turkey--

 

Food for Thought About Advanced Sciences;

America Said To Lead Europe In “Yollies”

 

One of the best things about being in Turkey is Turkish breakfasts. As one of my new Turkish friends, Elef, said to me, “You mean, you don’t eat olives for breakfast in America?” I’ve started off each day with at least an hour-long breakfast, sometimes two, just sipping tea and eating fresh-cut bread with salty white cheese, jam, honey, olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, and oddly enough, bits of hot dog. Sometimes you get a tomato-ey, cheesy scrambled egg as well. The Altin Yunus (the conference hotel) is no different, except that everything is served at an enormous buffet. And you can eat your breakfast looking out over the Aegean.

 

So, after breakfast, the conference started off with a speaker from the University of Illinois, Jozef Kokini, an expert in nanotechnology and food engineering. He says food science and agriculture are beginning to benefit from advances in nanotechnology, which is associated with advances in information technology and medicine. This merging of nanotechnology and food science is a field in its infancy, and Kokini gave an overview.

 

First, a quick explanation of nanotechnology. In terms of scale, let’s go from macro to micro: the head of a pin is a few millimeters; a dust mite is a about 200 microns; a blood cell is 2-5 micrometers; and 1 micrometer is 1000 nanometers. A DNA molecule is 2-10 nm. Kokini says that the range where we see value and impact is between 50-200 nanometers, and there are unique properties that emerge from being at those scales.

 

There are several possible impacts for food science. Nanotechnology might be able to help with food safety and efficiency in the creation of more sensitive devices and sensors. For instance, there has been work on “nanocantilevers” that have a characteristic resonant frequency that change when E.coli sit on them. Nanotechnology can also have an impact with functional foods, enabling the delivery of bioactive compounds with health benefits. It could also be used to enhance packaging materials.

 

Kokini drew a parallel to this emerging field with that of biotechnology, especially regarding advances in functional foods. He said the food science community needs to remain transparent and thorough about the way information is deduced, and to steer the public in the right direction so that people don’t become cynical about the value of the results.

 

I went to several other sessions, but the other one I’d like to share is a talk about knowledge-based bioeconomies by Dr. Artemis Karaali at Yeditepe University in Istanbul. The bioeconomy is any sector that derives its products from biomass, and is often described with the “Four F’s,” namely food, feed, fiber and fuel. It’s a 1.5 trillion dollar market in the EU. Karaali said the European bioeconomy can’t compete globally by delivering basic commodities, but rather needs to deliver innovations. It needs a “knowledge-based” bioeconomy, with knowledge-based defined as “advances in life-sciences and biotechnologies in convergence with other technologies such as nanotechnology, chemistry and information technology.”

 

Karaali said a major reason for Europe’s lag is a lack of world-class research infrastructures, the costs of which are usually too much for a single country. Another reason is fragmentation. In other words, different European countries are working on a lot of similar initiatives, which can be seen as a waste of resources and ‘duplication of efforts.’ An indicator of the EU-US gap: American biotechnology companies grow faster and generate six times the revenue of European companies. The new arrivals in the bioeconomy scene, Brazil, Russia, India and China are behind Europe, but closing the gap.

 

The future for Europe therefore lies in reducing fragmentation and strengthening its knowledge base. How to go about this? Give money to drivers of change. There are the so-called yollies, which are replacing yuppies: young leading innovators. Apparently, there are a lot more yollies hanging around in American cities than in the EU. Other goals are to focus funding on innovation, translational research, and to make research less bureaucratic.

 

Karaali is an advisor for the EU’s Framework Program 7 (FP7), which is a research and innovation framework. One of the thematic priorities is food and biotechnology, and a main objective is to “build a European knowledge-based bioeconomy” that will be the basis for “new eco-efficient and competitive biobased products.” More details about the plan are online at http://ec.europa.eu/research/fp7/.

 

The concept of frontier research was key in Karaali’s talk. This is a new initiative that aims to up the EU’s innovation game, so it’s focused on “high-risk/high-gain” and identifying (and funding) excellent individual researchers of any age, nationality or career stage. Turkish citizens are eligible for this funding as well, so there will be some additional sessions about this at the conference.

 

Some of the research priorities in Karaali’s presentation are biotech research, like GMO’s for biocontrol and bioremediation. Check my post tomorrow for more information—I’m going to try and track some Turkish scientists down for conversations about biotech in Turkey/EU.

 

May 29, 2011 Çeşme, Turkey--

 

 

Technical Lectures On Soy Related Issues

Presented At International Food Congress

 

This conference had many extremely technical presentations, and these were balanced by general overviews of certain emerging areas of research. However, I think I’d be remiss without describing a few of the more technical presentations I went to (without getting technical myself), just to give an idea of the content of the research.

 

So, one of the presentations I went to was about a new way to simultaneously identify soybean and poultry content in meats using DNA analysis. The presenter was a scientist named Ergün Şakalar, Fatih University, Turkey. The identity of meats and other contents in processed food isn’t readily apparent, and adding cheaper ingredients such as chicken or soybeans is common, Şakalar says. In order to enforce labeling requirements, to be sure the ingredients that are in the foods match labeling, there needs to be a convenient, economical way to analyze those ingredients. This researcher was improving on a method using real-time PCR (polymerase chain reaction) to identify the presence of soy and poultry additions in meat. Currently, you’d have to analyze for poultry and soy separately. With Şakalar’s method, you can test for both simultaneously. His team prepared different meat samples with soy and poultry in different proportions, and got accurate results.

 

Another research project dealt with the production of isoflavonoids from soy tissue cultures in an airlift bioreactor. The presenter was Alper Gueven, Tunceli University, Turkey. A lot of this session went pretty much over my head. Even the abstract is full of chemicals, acronyms and terms that don’t appear in Wikipedia, i.e. they mean very little to a non-chemist. Like much scientific research, this project had an inconclusive conclusion as a piece of a larger puzzle: optimum reactor design still needs to be investigated. What non-scientists can take away, however, is that research like this is contributing to ways of increasing the production of valuable phytochemicals found in plants and aiding in their mass production. This particular experiment concerns the production of isoflavonoids, which researchers have shown to be valuable as anticarcinogens, antioxidants and as helping osteoporosis and cardiovascular diseases. Soybeans happen to be full of isoflavonoids.

 

The last session I want to write about is a presentation on nutrigenomics and the future of functional food. I’ll just be able to give a rough summary, but I really like this topic. The presenter was Fatma Ekinci—who talked really, really fast. Ekinci is from Yeditepe University, Turkey. This was not about a specific experiment, but more of a conceptual talk outlining the boundaries and directions of functional food research. Ekinci started out talking about American polls, and how people believe that nutrition pays the greatest role in health, as opposed to exercise or family history. That explains the rise of functional foods, which provide benefits beyond basic nutrition. These can be foods enhanced with certain vitamins; they can be mineral pills or food with omega-3s or probiotics. They promote health and often claim to help fight certain illnesses. Nutrigenomics should guide the future of functional foods, Ekinci says. This is the study of how different foods interact with particular genes. Nutrigenomics asks the question, how is our gene profile responding to what we’re eating? How are foods influencing our DNA? These studies lead to the concept of personalized nutrition, Ekinci says, and even personalized medicine, since each person can respond to nutrition differently, and ‘individual genetic variation affects how nutrients are assimilated and metabolized by our bodies.’ Ekinci says nutrigenomics could be especially useful as the public could be more accepting of nutritional solutions (because these are more natural) than drugs for the prevention of diseases. The main goal of the field: improve global health, and in particular deal with obesity.

 

As a final note, I had an interesting conversation with Yeditepe University’s Dr. Artemis Karaali about biotechnology in Turkey. She says biotech research is just beginning in Turkey, and she’s putting me in touch with some researchers involved in those efforts. Just as a bit of background, public opinion in Turkey remains pretty fiercely anti-biotech from what I’ve read and heard. However, Karaali says the scientific community is divided, and there are some strong pro-biotech voices. Karaali said she herself believes the country shouldn’t remain behind on the science. I hope to continue the discussion with Karaali and some other researchers over email, so I’ll send an update on any information I get.