Ultra rice: Grains that heal come to India

June 28, 2008
By Syed Akbar
Hyderabad, June 27: Now it's rice that heals. Ultra rice, the artificial rice grains that worked wonders in Brazil, Columbia and China, will soon make its way into the Indian market.
Developed by internationally-renowned research and service organisation, PATH, Ultra rice looks and tastes just like the ordinary rice. But it contains special elements that will check anaemia and vitamin A and zinc deficiencies.
Ultra rice, when mixed with ordinary rice in the ratio 1:100, brings down maternal mortality rate during childbirth and blindness in young children, besides providing the much-needed micronutrients to people.
"We will soon introduce Ultra rice in the Indian market. We have already transferred the technology to a firm in West Bengal. Soon we will provide the technology to a government agency too. Micronutrient deficiencies threaten the health of people, particularly young mothers and children. Ultra rice will be the best nutrient substitute in the mid-day meal scheme," Michael Joseph, PATH's food technologist, told this correspondent.
Those using Ultra rice need not change their cooking habits. "When blended with rice and cooked like usual, the Ultra rice looks so much like white rice, it’s hard to differentiate," he points out.
The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition has proposed to fund a large-scale trial that will provide schoolchildren with fortified rice through the midday meal programme in the country. The department of biotechnology, Government of India, has already approved Ultra rice and declared it as safe for human consumption.
Studies by the city-based National Institute of Nutrition have found the taste
of Ultra rice was acceptable or good for 86 per cent of schoolchildren. As much as 98per cent of the iron was retained, even after the rice was rinsed multiple times before cooking.
Ultra rice resembles natural milled rice grains in size, shape, and colour, but
they are made from rice flour, selected micronutrients, and nutrient-protecting ingredients that are combined and extruded through a rice-shaped mold. When the Ultra rice grains are blended with white rice the result is nearly identical to unfortified rice in smell, taste, and texture.
Ultra rice is presently available in two formulations, one fortified with vitamin A, and the other carrying iron, thiamine, folic acid, and zinc.

Lakshadweep: Corals Make A Come Back

June 23, 2008
By Syed Akbar
Indian marine scientists and oceanographers have successfully repopulated corals in Lakshadweep showing the world that coral reefs can be created artificially.
Using the help of local people trained as scuba drivers, experts at the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, have artificially grown coral reefs near all the 10 islands in Lakshadweep. Coral reefs in India are present only at two places, Andaman and Nicobar and Lakshadweep and they suffered heavy damage in the last two decades because of human intervention.
"Coral reefs in India have been under stress for quite some time. Lakshadweep reefs bore the brunt of coral mining, souvenir coral collection, ground water pollution and mechanical damage owing to activities like dredging. We involved local people in rebuilding coral reefs in Lakshadweep," Dr MV Moideen Wafar told this correspondent
from Goa.
Corals are distributed below water surface down to 50 m depth, assessment of their well-being and management requires competence in scuba diving and observation skills. Dr Wafar and his team created a dive centre in Lakshadweep, acquired diving kits, trained a broad spectrum of stakeholders ranging from officers, wardens, scientific staff to unemployed local youth.
The scientists then took up transplantation of corals to repopulate damaged coral reef areas. During the last two years the technique has been tested and found suitable. It is also simple enough to be used by the local population with limited or no knowledge of corals.
"I am in the process of transferring this to a community-involved exercise in all islands so that reef restoration is enhanced and additional income generated for the local population by way of fish catch from near the transplantation site," he said.
Repopulating corals is a hectic task as corals grow very slowly. The massive ones like the brain corals grow no more than a cm per year. This is because the calcium carbonate deposition is a slow process and the growth occurs in all directions. The branching corals are relatively fast-growing. Some of them can grow as much as 18 to 20 cm per year but their skeletons are less dense than those of the massive ones.
Unlike the fringing reefs which are common around the islands in the Gulf of Mannar, Gulf of Kachchh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the reefs in the Lakshadweep group of islands are oceanic atolls.
During the summer in 1998 a vast layer of warm surface waters spread over the whole tropical region. As a result, the temperature increased by two degrees higher than the seasonal maximum and persisted for several weeks. This was too much for corals. Most of them, in particular the branching corals which are more sensitive, got bleached and died, eventually leaving vast stretches of the reefs barren.
More than 40 countries reported impacts varying from moderate to severe. In India, Andaman and Nicobar reefs were the most severely affected (up to 80 per cent death of corals) followed by Lakshadweep (40 to 80 per cent) and Gulf of Mannar (60 per cent) reefs.
"Our Lakshadweep coral reefs are no more a splendour as was before. In the last three decades we lost lot of our corals, due in part to our own developmental activities and in part to the massive bleaching in 1998. We are left now with reefs that have hardly a quarter of live coral cover - reefs where we could not put our foot down earlier without crushing a coral are now barren for long stretches," Dr Wafar said.
The NIO scientists have been experimenting with growing the corals. The idea is simple, collect fragments of corals, transplant them to secure bases and let them grow in new sites or those sites where they were once luxuriant.
The team carried out initial experiments in the Kavaratti lagoon. The most affected coral general such as Acropora and Pocillopora were selected for this trial. The scientist used 2 x 2 m iron frames with 30 cm high supports and covered with a metal screen. The frames were deployed first at 3 m depth in the lagoon where coral life was totally absent.
Slabs of concrete and coral stones (12 x 12 cm) were used as bases for transplantation. The coral pieces were tied to the bases with thin nylon string and the slabs in turn were secured to the metal screen. Securing the corals to the slabs and the slabs to the frame was done underwater by SCUBA divers in order to minimise stress to the corals. During regular visits, the length of the transplanted coral was measured. In addition, notes were made of the increase in other life forms, like fishes and animals like sea cucumbers, crabs and snails.
In each visit, the frames were cleared of the debris and algal matter. Form the photographs accompanying this article, one can compare how the transplants looked like at the beginning of the experiment and again after 11 months. Besides the formation of several branches, the growth, in terms of increase in length, was of the order of 5-10 cm in Acropora and 2 cm in Pocillopora, with no significant
differences between those secured on concrete and coral stone slabs. There was also no mortality of corals at all during the one year which includes a 4-month monsoon period known for rough sea conditions and low light transparency. This was due to the care exercised in handling the fragments, locating good sites for transplantation and continuous monitoring. What is of further interest is the increase in other biodiversity at the site - several species of fishes besides
holothurians, cowries and snails have colonised the transplantation site.
"We now have a simple technique to increase the coral cover and biodiversity in our reefs as fast as possible. Besides increasing live coral cover, this could also serve tourists who neither swim nor dive and yet would like to see corals at shallow waters. As this technique does not demand high skills, this could be developed into a community venture, generating modest income for local slanders as well as
instilling in them a sense of commitment to coral reef conservation," he said.

Black Holes Have Simple Feeding Habits

June 20, 2008
The biggest black holes may feed just like the smallest ones, according to data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based telescopes. This discovery supports the implication of Einstein's relativity theory that black holes of all sizes have similar properties, and will be useful for predicting the properties of a conjectured new class of black holes.
The conclusion comes from a large observing campaign of the spiral galaxy M81, which is about 12 million light years from Earth. In the center of M81 is a black hole that is about 70 million times more massive than the Sun, and generates energy and radiation as it pulls gas in the central region of the galaxy inwards at high speed.
In contrast, so-called stellar mass black holes, which have about 10 times more mass than the Sun, have a different source of food. These smaller black holes acquire new material by pulling gas from an orbiting companion star. Because the bigger and smaller black holes are found in different environments with different sources of material to feed from, a question has remained about whether they feed in the same way.
Using these new observations and a detailed theoretical model, a research team compared the properties of M81's black hole with those of stellar mass black holes. The results show that either big or little, black holes indeed appear to eat similarly to each other, and produce a similar distribution of X-rays, optical and radio light.
One of the implications of Einstein's theory of General Relativity is that black holes are simple objects and only their masses and spins determine their effect on space-time. The latest research indicates that this simplicity manifests itself in spite of complicated environmental effects.
"This confirms that the feeding patterns for black holes of different sizes can be very similar," said Sera Markoff of the Astronomical Institute, University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, who led the study. "We thought this was the case, but up until now we haven't been able to nail it."
The model that Markoff and her colleagues used to study the black holes includes a faint disk of material spinning around the black hole. This structure would mainly produce X-rays and optical light. A region of hot gas around the black hole would be seen largely in ultraviolet and X-ray light. A large contribution to both the radio and X-ray light comes from jets generated by the black hole. Multi-wavelength data is needed to disentangle these overlapping sources of light.
"When we look at the data, it turns out that our model works just as well for the giant black hole in M81 as it does for the smaller guys," said Michael Nowak, a coauthor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Everything around this huge black hole looks just the same except it's almost 10 million times bigger."
Among actively feeding black holes the one in M81 is one of the dimmest, presumably because it is "underfed". It is, however, one of the brightest as seen from Earth because of its relative proximity, allowing high quality observations to be made.
"It seems like the underfed black holes are the simplest in practice, perhaps because we can see closer to the black hole," said Andrew Young of the University of Bristol in England. "They don't seem to care too much where they get their food from."
This work should be useful for predicting the properties of a third, unconfirmed class called intermediate mass black holes, with masses lying between those of stellar and supermassive black holes. Some possible members of this class have been identified, but the evidence is controversial, so specific predictions for the properties of these black holes should be very helpful.
In addition to Chandra, three radio arrays (the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope, the Very Large Array and the Very Long Baseline Array), two millimeter telescopes (the Plateau de Bure Interferometer and the Submillimeter Array), and Lick Observatory in the optical were used to monitor M81. These observations were made simultaneously to ensure that brightness variations because of changes in feeding rates did not confuse the results. Chandra is the only X-ray satellite able to isolate the faint X-rays of the black hole from the emission of the rest of the galaxy.
This result confirms less detailed earlier work by Andrea Merloni from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany and colleagues that suggested that the basic properties of larger black holes are similar to the smaller ones. Their study, however, was not based on simultaneous, multi-wavelength observations nor the application of a detailed physical model.

Worm-like Marine Animal Providing Fresh Clues About Human Evolution

June 20, 2008
Research on the genome of a marine creature led by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego is shedding new light on a key area of the tree of life.
Linda Holland, a research biologist at Scripps Oceanography, and her colleagues from the United States, Europe and Asia, have deciphered and analyzed fundamental elements of the genetic makeup of a small, worm-like marine animal called amphioxus, also known as a lancelet.
Amphioxus is not widely known to the general public, but is gaining interest in scientific circles because of its position as one of the closest living invertebrate relatives of vertebrates. Although amphioxus split from vertebrates more than 520 million years ago, its genome holds tantalizing clues about evolution.
The research led by Holland is published in the July issue of the journal Genome Research. A corresponding research paper is published in the June 19 issue of Nature.
Holland and her colleagues studied the genes of the amphioxus species Branchiostoma floridae through samples obtained in recent years during field work off Tampa, Fla.
Because amphioxus is evolving slowly—its body plan remains similar to that of fossils from the Cambrian time—the animal serves as an intriguing comparison point for tracing how vertebrates have evolved and adapted. This includes new information about how vertebrates have employed old genes for new functions.
“We are finding that today’s complicated vertebrate has not invented a lot of new genes to become complicated,” said Holland, of the Marine Biology Research Division at Scripps Oceanography. “Amphioxus shows us that vertebrates have taken old genes and recombined them, changed their regulation and perhaps changed the gene function.”
Originally discovered in the 1700s, amphioxus appears fish-like with a small tail fin and medial fins, but no paired ones. They spend most of their time burrowed in sand, with their snouts extended for filter feeding.
The human genome has only about 25 percent more genes than the amphioxus genome, according to Holland. During evolution, humans have duplicated genes for different functions. Such duplication has given humans and other vertebrates a much larger “toolkit” for making various structures that are absent in amphioxus, including cells for pigment and collagen type II-based cartilage, for example.
In the new research, Holland and her colleagues describe success in probing the roots of important functions such as immunity. While vertebrates have two types of immune systems—innate, which is a general first line of defense against pathogens, and adaptive, involving antibodies specific for particular pathogens—invertebrates like amphioxus have only innate immune systems. In amphioxus, several of these innate immune genes have been independently duplicated many times over. It may be that with a second line of defense, vertebrates, compared with invertebrates like amphioxus, are less reliant on innate immunity to ward off infection.
The neural crest cells of vertebrates are an excellent example of how “old” genes have acquired new functions. In all vertebrates, neural crest cells migrate from the developing neural tube throughout the body, giving rise to such structures as pigment cells, cartilage of the head and a number of other cell types. Although amphioxus has a brain and spinal cord and makes them using the same genes in the same way as vertebrates, amphioxus has no neural crest cells. Even so, amphioxus has all of the genes necessary for generating migratory neural crest cells; vertebrates have just put them together in new ways. It can be compared with a chef who takes basic leftovers in a refrigerator and whips up a fine gourmet dish.
“The take-home message from this sequencing is that the human and amphioxus genomes are very much alike,” said Holland.
A collaborative effort of some 30 laboratories around the world solved the sequence of the amphioxus genome.
Further, deeper analyses between the amphioxus and human genomes in the years ahead will provide even more important clues about genetic evolution.
“All of this is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Holland. “It will take a number of years for people to look in greater depth at the amphioxus and human genomes. In terms of figuring out what evolution has done and how it generally works, the amphioxus genome has really been a goldmine and will continue to be one in the years ahead.”

Researchers Link Memory Loss to Poor Diet

June 20, 2008
Loss of memory with advanced age is a significant problem within most societies, and appears particularly severe in advanced industrialized nations. A less visible and often ignored problem comes from a food supply high in cholesterol and saturated fat, which has led to high obesity rates particularly in the United States. In a study published in the June issue of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, researchers from the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) have linked memory loss to a diet high in saturated fat and cholesterol.
Collaboration between two laboratories at MUSC and one at Arizona State University led researchers to discover that rodents that were fed a diet high in cholesterol and saturated fat displayed impairment in working memory. This memory loss is associated with inflammation in the brain, as well as the impairment of structural proteins that affect how a nerve cell functions. As inflammation is associated with a poor diet, the failure of functions in other key organs such as the eye and the ear also could be expected.
Assuming that the same phenomenon occurs in human beings, the study suggests that as humans age, memory may be preserved and brain functions improved by restricting the consumption of cholesterol and saturated fats. As cases of obesity and obesity-related diseases have increased exponentially in the United States, and are second only to tobacco use for premature mortality and the number of health-care dollars spent, the importance of this issue is immediate.
“Effects of a Saturated Fat and High Cholesterol Diet on Memory and Hippocampal Morphology in the Middle-Aged Rat,” authored by Ann-Charlotte Granholm, Heather A. Bimonte-Nelson, Alfred B. Moore, Matthew E. Nelson, Linnea R. Freeman and Kumar Sambamurti, appeared in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease 14:2 (June 2008), pp. 133-145.

Study Links Vitamin D to Colon Cancer Survival

June 20, 2008
Patients diagnosed with colon cancer who had abundant vitamin D in their blood were less likely to die during a follow-up period than those who were deficient in the vitamin, according to a new study by scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
The findings of the study -- the first to examine the effect of vitamin D among colorectal cancer patients -- merit further research, but it is too early to recommend supplements as a part of treatment, say the investigators from Dana-Farber and the Harvard School of Public Health.
In a report in the June 20 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the authors note that previous research has shown that higher levels of vitamin D reduce the risk of developing colon and rectal cancer by about 50 percent, but the effect on outcomes wasn't known. To examine this question, the investigators, led by Kimmie Ng, MD, MPH, and Charles Fuchs, MD, MPH, of Dana-Farber, analyzed data from two long-running epidemiologic studies whose participants gave blood samples and whose health has been monitored for many years.
They identified 304 participants in the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Followup Study who were diagnosed with colorectal cancer between 1991 and 2002. All had had vitamin D levels measured in blood samples given at least two year prior to their diagnosis. Each patient's vitamin D measurement was ranked by "quartiles" -- the top 25 percent, the next lowest 25 percent, and so on. Those whose levels were in the lowest quartile were considered deficient in vitamin D.
The researchers followed the 304 patients until they died or until 2005, whichever occurred first. During that period, 123 patients died, with 96 of them dying from colon or rectal cancer. The researchers then looked for associations between the patients’ previously measured vitamin D blood levels and whether they had died or survived.
The results showed that individuals with the vitamin D levels in the highest quartile were 48 percent less likely to die (from any cause, including colon cancer) than those with the lowest vitamin D measurements. The odds of dying from colon cancer specifically were 39 percent lower, the scientists found.
"Our data suggest that higher prediagnosis plasma levels of [vitamin D] after a diagnosis of colorectal cancer may significantly improve overall survival," the authors wrote. "Future trials should examine the role of vitamin D supplementation in patients with colorectal cancer."
The measurements of vitamin D in the patients' blood reflected both the amounts made by the body when exposed to sunlight and to all sources of the vitamin in their diets, said Ng. However, she added, there may be additional unknown factors that might account for individual differences. Patients with the highest vitamin D levels tended to have lower body-mass index (BMI) indicating that they were leaner, and also were more physically active. However, after controlling for BMI and physical activity, as well as other prognostic factors, higher vitamin D levels were still independently associated with better survival rates.
Ng said that a trial is being planned in which colon cancer patients will take vitamin D along with post-surgery chemotherapy to look for any benefits of the supplements.
Meanwhile, she said that individuals with colon cancer should consult their physicians as to whether they should add vitamin supplements to their daily regimen. Standard recommended daily amounts of vitamin D supplements range from 200 International Units (IU) per day for people under age 50 to 400 IU for people between 50 and 70, and 600 IU for those over 70.
Other authors of the study include Jeffrey Meyerhardt, MD, MPH, of Dana-Farber; Kana Wu, MD, PhD, and Edward Giovannucci, MD, ScD, of the Harvard School of Public Health; Diane Feskanich, ScD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Bruce Hollis, PhD, of the Medical University of South Carolina.
The research was supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (http://www.dana-farber.org) is a principal teaching affiliate of the Harvard Medical School and is among the leading cancer research and care centers in the United States. It is a founding member of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC), designated a comprehensive cancer center by the National Cancer Institute.