Tokyo Disney Resort’s New Frozen Dessert Drinks

Pistachio Jelly and Salted Lemon Smoothie

Strawberry Jelly and Milk Soft-serve Ice Cream]

Apricot Jelly and Earl Grey Tea

Coffee Jelly & Hazelnut Chocolate Mousse

The price of each drink is 500 Yen (about US$4.20).

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A Potato Made with Gene Editing

Plant scientists can swiftly modify crops in ways that would take years with conventional breeding.

Dan Voytas is a plant geneticist at the University of Minnesota. But two days a week he stops studying the fundamentals of DNA engineering and heads to a nearby company called Cellectis Plant Sciences, where he applies them.

His newest creation, described in a plant journal this month, is a Ranger Russet potato that doesn’t accumulate sweet sugars at typical cold storage temperatures. That will let it last longer, and when it’s fried it won’t produce as much acrylamide, a suspected carcinogen.

What’s different about the potato is that it was bred with the help of gene editing, a new kind of technique for altering DNA that plant scientists say is going to be revolutionary for its simplicity and power. The technology could also be a way to engineer plants that avoid the stigma, and the regulations, normally associated with genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

In the case of the Ranger Russet, Voytas’s gene-editing technique, known as TALENs, left behind no trace other than a few deleted letters of DNA. The edit disabled a single gene that turns sucrose into glucose and fructose. Without it, Voytas thinks, the potatoes can be stored far longer without loss of quality.

The potato is a prototype of what plant scientists say is a rapidly arriving new generation of genetically modified plants. With gene editing, small companies think they can very quickly develop new crops for a fraction of the typical cost—even in species so far mostly untouched by biotechnology, like avocados, sorghum, and decorative flowers.

Most genetically modified crops that have been grown commercially so far incorporate genes from bacteria to make them produce insecticides or resist weed killers. Public opposition and regulatory requirements make these transgenic plants expensive to develop. That is why nearly all biotech plants are lucrative, big-acreage crops like soy, corn, and cotton and are sold by just a few large companies, like Monsanto and DuPont.

In August, the U.S. Department of Agriculture told Cellectis that unlike transgenic plants, its potato wouldn’t be regulated. That means instead of being grown in fenced-in test plots and generating folder upon folder of safety data, the Ranger Russet may go quickly to the market. Two years ago the agency reached a similar conclusion when it considered a DNA-edited corn plant developed by Dow AgroSciences, although it isn’t being sold yet.

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Scientists say products like the potato are just the start for gene-editing techniques in plants. The same technologies are going to allow far more sophisticated engineering, including manipulation of photosynthesis to make plants grow faster and yield more food. “It’s an enormous opportunity, an unfathomable opportunity,” says Martin Spalding, a plant researcher at Iowa State University.

For now, the techniques are being used to modify plants in more modest ways. “The first wave of this technology is just removing a few base pairs,” says Yinong Yang, a professor of plant pathology at Penn State University, referring to the combinations of DNA letters—A, G, C, and T—that make up a genome. By “knocking out” just the right gene, as researchers did with the potato, it’s possible to give a plant a few valuable properties.

The next step, Yang says, will be to change the DNA letters of plant genes, swapping one plant’s version of a gene for that of another known to offer, say, resistance to disease. Yang says there is a blight-resistant form of rice that differs from commercial species by only a few DNA letters. “I could just change that over to resistance,” he says. “It’s like gene therapy in humans.” He says he’s negotiating a contract to produce the gene-edited rice now.

As for Voytas, this isn’t the first time he has set out to gene-edit plants. A decade ago he started a company called Phytodyne based on an earlier technology, called zinc finger nucleases, but it folded after Dow AgroSciences paid more than $50 million for exclusive rights to use that type of gene editing in plants.

Voytas teamed up with the French biotechnology company Cellectis in 2010 after it offered to install him as science chief of a new plant engineering division. But initial efforts ran into difficulty when another gene-editing system, meganucleases, proved challenging to work with and also got tied up by patent disputes.

Eventually, Voytas returned to the lab and coinvented a new way to edit genes, using specially engineered proteins called TALENs. That technology was used to make Cellectis’s potato, as well as a soybean with improved oil. Since then, Voytas and Cellectis have also worked with a newer technique, called CRISPR (see “Genome Surgery”).

Voytas says the potato took only about a year to create. “If you did it via breeding it would take five to 10 years,” he says.

Altogether, says Luc Mathis, CEO of Cellectis Plant Sciences, developing the potato cost a tenth of what it does to create and bring to market a transgenic plant, like corn or soy. “We will still need to generate some data, but it will not be a huge process,” says Mathis, who continues to meet with regulators to determine what steps remain before the potato can be sold.

Cellectis will move ahead with preliminary planting as soon as warm weather arrives in Minnesota. The first crops will determine whether the potatoes have the commercial benefits seen in greenhouse tests. “We need to check that we can store the potato in the cold,” says Mathis. “Once we have the commercial proof of concept, we can discuss with farmers what the interest level is.”

Kevin Folta, a professor of horticultural sciences at the University of Florida, says about 50 experts, including scientists and lawyers, met in Arizona earlier this year to discuss gene editing and how to orchestrate the industry’s approach to regulators in the United States and abroad. “Anyone who works in any kind of plant engineering is vigorously pursuing these technologies, especially with crops that have complex genomes or that you can’t breed easily,” he says. “There are lots of plants that need solutions.” He says gene editing will allow citrus trees to be modified in ways that would take 150 years with conventional breeding.

Folta says opponents of GMOs were not included in the planning meeting. “To invite people who view things nonscientifically would clog the discussion,” says. “There is no technology they are happy with.”

Source: MIT Technology Review

Sugar and Carbs, not Physical Inactivity, Behind Surge in Obesity, Say Experts

Excess sugar and carbs, not physical inactivity, are behind the surge in obesity, say experts in an editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine published online today.

It’s time to bust the myth that anyone–and that includes athletes–can outrun a bad diet, they say.

Regular exercise is key to staving off serious disease, such as diabetes, heart disease, and dementia, write the authors, but our calorie laden diets now generate more ill health than physical inactivity, alcohol, and smoking combined.

The evidence now suggests that up to 40% of those within a normal weight (BMI) range will none the less harbour harmful metabolic abnormalities typically associated with obesity.

But few people realise this, and many wrongly believe that obesity is entirely due to lack of exercise, a perception that is firmly rooted in corporate marketing, say the authors.

They describe the public relations tactics of the food industry as “chillingly similar to those of Big Tobacco,” which deployed denial, doubt, confusion and “bent scientists” to convince the public that smoking was not linked to lung cancer.

“Celebrity endorsements of sugary drinks and the association of junk food and sport must end,” they declare, adding that health clubs and gyms need to set an example by removing the sale of these products from their premises. “The ‘health halo’ legitimisation of nutritionally deficient products is misleading and unscientific,” they write.

Public health messaging has unhelpfully focused on maintaining a ‘healthy weight’ through calorie counting, but it’s the source of the calories that matters, they point out. “Sugar calories promote fat storage and hunger. Fat calories induce fullness or satiation,” they write.

The prevalence of diabetes increases 11-fold for every 150 additional sugar calories consumed daily, compared with the equivalent amount of calories consumed as fat, they say.

And the evidence now suggests that carbs are no better, they add. Recent research indicates that cutting down on dietary carbohydrate is the single most effective approach for reducing all of the features of the metabolic syndrome and should be the primary strategy for treating diabetes, with benefits occurring even in the absence of weight loss.

Furthermore, other research suggests that rather than carbohydrate loading ahead of intense exercise, athletes would be better off adopting a high fat low carb diet, particularly those who are already insulin resistant.

The food environment needs to be changed so that people automatically make healthy choices, suggest the authors. This “will have far greater impact on population health than counselling or education. Healthy choice must become the easy choice,” they say.

“It’s time to wind back the harms caused by the junk food industry’s public relations machinery. Let’s bust the myth of physical inactivity and obesity. You can’t outrun a bad diet,” they conclude.

Source: British Journal of Sports Medicine

Chocolate Cake Made with Cooked Quinoa

Ingredients

2/3 cup white or golden quinoa
1-1/3 cups water
1/3 cup milk
4 large eggs
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
3/4 cup butter, melted and cooled
1½ cups white or cane sugar
1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1½ tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Method

1. Bring the quinoa and water to a boil in a medium saucepan. Cover, reduce to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes. Turn off the heat and leave the covered saucepan on the burner for another 10 minutes. Fluff with a fork and allow the quinoa to cool.
2. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly grease two 8-inch round or square cake pans. Line the bottoms of the pans with parchment paper.
3. Combine the milk, eggs and vanilla in a blender or food processor. Add 2 cups of cooked quinoa and the butter and continue to blend until smooth.
4. Whisk together the sugar, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl. Add the contents of the blender and mix well. Divide the batter evenly between the 2 pans and bake on the center oven rack for 4o to 45 minutes or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove the cake from the oven and cool completely in the pan before serving. Frost if desired.
5. Store in a sealed container in the refrigerator for up to 1 week or freeze for up to 1 month.

Makes 8 to 16 servings.

Source: Quinoa 365

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Today’s Comic

In Pictures: Images of Landscape Made with Food

Foodscape

See more pictures at Google Drive . . . .