Chemistry Of Cooking - - - A Biochemist Explains The Chemistry Of Cooking

A biochemist and cook explains that cooking is all about chemistry and knowing some facts can help chefs understand why recipes go wrong. Because cooking is essentially a series of chemical reactions, it is helpful to know some basics. For example, plunging asparagus into boiling water causes the cells to pop and result in a brighter green. Longer cooking, however, causes the plant's cell walls to shrink and releases an acid. This turns the asparagus an unappetizing shade of grey.
 

You love to cook, but have you whipped up some disasters? Even the best recipes can sometimes go terribly wrong. A nationally recognized scientist and chef says knowing a little chemistry could help.

Long before she was a cook, Shirley Corriher was a biochemist. She says science is the key to understanding what goes right and wrong in the kitchen.

"Cooking is chemistry," said Corriher. "It's essentially chemical reactions."

This kind of chemistry happens when you put chopped red cabbage into a hot pan. Heat breaks down the red anthocyanine pigment, changing it from an acid to alkaline and causing the color change. Add some vinegar to increase the acidity, and the cabbage is red again. Baking soda will change it back to blue.

Cooking vegetables like asparagus causes a different kind of reaction when tiny air cells on the surface hit boiling water.

"If we plunge them into boiling water, we pop these cells, and they suddenly become much brighter green," Corriher said.

Longer cooking is not so good. It causes the plant's cell walls to shrink and release acid.

"So as it starts gushing out of the cells, and with acid in the water, it turns cooked green vegetables into [a] yucky army drab," Corriher said.

And that pretty fruit bowl on your counter? "Literally, overnight you can go from [a] nice green banana to an overripe banana," Corriher said.

The culprit here is ethylene gas. Given off by apples and even the bananas themselves, it can ruin your perfect fruit bowl -- but put an apple in a paper bag with an unripe avocado, and ethylene gas will work for you overnight.

"We use this as a quick way to ripen," Corriher said. Corriher says understanding a little chemistry can help any cook.

"You may still mess up, but you know why," she said. When it works, this kind of chemistry can be downright delicious.

WHAT ARE ACIDS AND BASES? An acid is defined as a solution with more positive hydrogen ions than negative hydroxyl ions, which are made of one atom of oxygen and one of hydrogen. Acidity and basicity are measured on a scale called the pH scale. The value of freshly distilled water is seven, which indicates a neutral solution. A value of less than seven indicates an acid, and a value of more than seven indicates a base. Common acids include lemon juice and coffee, while common bases include ammonia and bleach.

WHY DOES FOOD SPOIL? Processing and improper storage practices can expose food items to heat or oxygen, which causes deterioration. In ancient times, salt was used to cure meats and fish to preserve them longer, while sugar was added to fruits to prevent spoilage. Certain herbs, spices and vinegar can also be used as preservatives, along with anti-oxidants, most notably Vitamins C and E. In processed foods, certain FDA-approved chemical additives also help extend shelf life.

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Younger Brains Are Easier to Rewire -- Brain Regions Can Switch Functions

Younger Brains Are Easier to Rewire -- Brain Regions Can Switch Functions
A new paper from MIT neuroscientists, in collaboration with Alvaro Pascual-Leone at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, offers evidence that it is easier to rewire the brain early in life. The researchers found that a small part of the brain's visual cortex that processes motion became reorganized only in the brains of subjects who had been born blind, not those who became blind later in life.

The new findings, described in the Oct. 14 issue of the journal Current Biology, shed light on how the brain wires itself during the first few years of life, and could help scientists understand how to optimize the brain's ability to be rewired later in life. That could become increasingly important as medical advances make it possible for congenitally blind people to have

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Cleaning Infected Blood - Biologists Develop Machine To Remove Viruses From Blood

infectious disease experts designed a machine called the hemopurifier. It works much like a dialysis machine, using thin fibers to capture and remove viruses from the blood it filters. The machine requires the drawing of blood through an artery, which is sent through a tube into the machine, then back into the body. It can treat a number of illnesses.

Every day, 14,000 people are infected with HIV, the virus that leads to AIDs. There's no cure, but now a breakthrough -- a machine that could clean blood, keeping more and more people alive longer.

"I remember lying in bed thinking, 'I am going to die. I'm going to die. I feel so sick.' And I remember thinking laying in that bed, 'And I know exactly what it is,'" HIV patient John Paul Womble, told Ivanhoe. HIV could kill Womble. He watched his father die from the virus and now he is living

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Mumbai Boy won a reality TV show to fund his dream stem cell research

Caezaan Keshvani is currently enrolled in university in New York, USA. Before he began his PhD programme at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, he studied at University of Sheffield, UK. What made this all possible for this bright young man who had all but given up hope of ever studying abroad? Winning a reality television show.

Raised in Mumbai, Caezaan's story is a little different from the thousands of Indian students who head abroad each year. After completing his CIE A levels, he planned to head abroad to study. As he planned his next step, tragedy struck. His father, a doctor, was seriously injured in the train bomb blasts in Mumbai in 2006 and most of the family savings were used up for the multiple surgeries he had to undergo. As his study abroad hopes gradually dwindled, Caezaan learned of a reality show that offered the winner a 100-per cent

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Antibodies with More “Hang Time” May Give Researchers a Jump on New HIV Vaccine Strategy

Researchers are inching their way toward a new HIV vaccine strategy by studying the cells of people who have naturally—and bafflingly—strong immune defenses against the virus.

Last year, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Michel C. Nussenzweig's team figured out how to isolate key immune cells from rare individuals who are HIV-positive but carry very low levels of the virus in their blood and have only mild, if any, symptoms.

That study found that these individuals produce a diverse army of antibodies—blood proteins that go after foreign invaders—to target HIV particles from multiple angles.

Now, the team has discovered that some of these so-called 'broadly neutralizing antibodies' are versatile in another way: a single antibody can bind to two structurally distinct sites on an HIV particle at once. The findings are published in the September 29, 2010 issue of the journal Nature.

Although neutralizing antibodies cannot cure HIV once an individual is infected, experiments in primates

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Some useful books for CSIR

Hi every one,
Some useful books for CSIR
I found some useful books given as reference for CSIR and these books can help us to prepare for all exams including DBT, BARC, ICMR also...

Lehninger- Biochemistry,
Cooper/ Benjamin- Molecular Biology,
Wilson and Walker- Calculations in Biochem/ Practical Chemistry,and also for biophysics,
Kuby- Immunology,
Animal Physiology- Wikipedia notes,
Prescott- Microbiogy,
Pelzar- Microbiology
Whittaker- Bioprocess
NCERT books- 11, 12 (Biology, Physics, Maths)
Gupta- Statistics,
Ecology- Odum,
General Biology- Campbell and reece,
Gardner- Genetics (especially for the problems of mendelian genetics, quantitative genetics)
Life book
Zoology- Reece,
Invertebrates- Agarwal

Also try solving the model question papers given in the website, and try to solve almost problems given at the end of each chapter.

Different approach needed for preparing section-A of paper-I, which is a general paper and only a thorough knowledge of CBSE books will siffice ot answer atleast 25 questions.

some logical questions are asked in paperI, for that Rastogi books are available for conveying basics of logical reasoning and verbal ability

Try to watch animations of Benjamin to understand some tough topics of molecular biology, as they are very understandable and concepots are given clearly.

Also many informations and quizzes are available in online of the book of Biology- Campbell as it will be useful fo paperI of subject, these covers basic concepts and remembering is easier, pls make use of it!

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Fwd: Bioinformatics

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Escape analysis and lock coarsening in JAVA 6.0 Posted: 16 Oct 2010 12:37 AM PDT The popularity of the Java programming language has made escape analysis a target of interest. Java's combination of heap-only object allocation, built-in threading, and the Sun HotSpot dynamic compiler creates a candidate platform for escape analysis related optimizations. Escape analysis is implemented in Java Standard Edition 6. Example (Java) class A { final int finalValue; public A( B b ) { super(); b.doSomething( this ); // this escapes! finalValue = 23; } int getTheValue() { return finalValue; } } class B { void doSomething( A a ) { System.out.println( a.getTheValue() ); } } In this example, the constructor for class A passes the new instance of A to B.doSomething. As a result, the instance of A—and all of its fields—escapes the scope of the constructor. Java is able to manage multithreading at the language level. Multithreading is a technique that allows programs to operate faster on computer system that have multiple CPUs. Also, a multithreaded application has the ability to remain responsive to input, even when it is performing long running tasks. However, programs that use multithreading need to take extra care of objects shared between threads, locking access to shared methods or blocks when they are used by one of the threads. Locking a block or an object is a time-consuming operation due to the nature of the underlying operating system-level operation involved . As the Java library does not know which methods will be used by more than one thread, the standard library always locks blocks when necessary in a multithreaded environment. Prior to Java 6, the virtual machine always locked objects and blocks when asked to by the program even if there was no risk of an object being modified by two different threads at the same time. For example, in this case, a local Vector was locked before each of the add operations to ensure that it would not be modified by other threads (Vector is synchronized), but because it is strictly local to the method this is not necessary: public String getNames() { Vector v = new Vector(); v.add("Me"); v.add("You"); v.add("Her"); return v.toString(); } Starting with Java 6, code blocks and objects are locked only when necessary , so in the above case, the virtual machine would not lock the Vector object at all

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Cockroach brains, coming to a pharmacy near you -Insect tissue extracts show antibacterial activity

Cockroaches may be nasty bugs, but they could help fight even nastier ones. New research finds that the rudimentary brains of cockroaches and locusts teem with antimicrobial compounds that slay harmful E. coli and MRSA, the antibiotic-resistant staph bacterium. The work could lead to new compounds for fighting infectious diseases in humans.

Extracts of ground-up brain and other nerve tissue from the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana, and desert locust, Schistocerca gregaria, killed more than 90 percent of a type of E. coli that causes meningitis, and also killed methicillin-resistant staph, microbiologist Simon Lee reported September 7 at the Society for General Microbiology meeting at the University of Nottingham in England.

"Some of these insects live in the filthiest places ever known to man," says Naveed Khan, coauthor of the new study. "These insects crawl on dead tissue, in sewage, in drainage areas. We thought, 'How do they cope with all the bacteria and parasites?'"

Khan and his colleagues became intrigued by insect antimicrobials when they noticed that many soldiers were returning from the Middle East with unusual infections, yet locusts living in the same areas were unperturbed. So the researchers, all from the University of Nottingham, began investigating how the insects ward off disease.

The team ground up various body parts from both cockroaches and locusts that had been reared in the lab and incubated them for two hours with different bacteria. Leaving these mixtures overnight on petri dishes revealed that the extracts from brains and from locust thorax nerve tissue killed nearly 100 percent of the bacteria.

Yet the insect brain extracts didn't seem to bother human kidney or epithelial cells when grown with them in a lab dish.

Curiously, extracts of insect fat, muscle and blood didn't bother the bacteria at all. Cockroaches and locusts often eat stuff loaded with microbes, says parasitologist Carl Lowenberger of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, so you would think insect guts and blood, which bathes the organs, would have similar antimicrobial activity.

Nine molecules appear to be responsible for the antimicrobial activity in locust tissue, although they have yet to be identified. The team is also still working out the details of the cockroach compounds.

The compounds may work together as a cocktail, Lowenberger says. Insects make hundreds of antimicrobial compounds, and it may be that very high concentrations of those molecules would be required for fighting an infection in humans. But the research "is pretty neat stuff," he says. And perhaps down the road, the yet-unidentified molecules will prove useful in fighting infections in people.

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Doggy Genes: Newly Sequenced Genome Could Shed Light on Human Diseases

Molecular biologists have completely sequenced the first dog genome. Understanding how genetics plays a role in canine diseases could lead to new treatments for diseases shared by humans, such as diabetes, epilepsy and cancer. Breeders could also soon be able to check the purity of pedigrees by sending dogs' cheek swabs to the lab.

We may be more like dogs than we think. Now, a complete map of dog genes not only helps explain what gives dogs their unique set of traits, behaviors, and diseases -- it could help identify human diseases, too. Why are some dogs excellent ball chasers and others perfect for your lap? The answer to dog differences is hidden in specific sequences of DNA called genes. A standard poodle, named Shadow, was the first dog to have its genes mapped, but it was only about 80-percent complete. For the first time, molecular biologists have completely mapped out the genes of a boxer.

"The boxer genome will help us get at the genes responsible for diseases and traits in dogs," says Ewen Kirkness, a molecular biologist at The Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Md. Dogs and humans share many of the same diseases, like diabetes, epilepsy and cancer. Mapping dog genes could be the chief tool in finding disease-causing genes in people, because Kirkness says the same genes will be responsible for similar diseases in humans. Genes that cause disease in dogs are easier to find than in people. Mutations in a dozen different genes can cause human disease, almost impossible to find. In dogs, only one gene mutation can cause a disease, and that same mutated gene causes an identical disease in humans. "Then we have a better handle on what is causing the disease in humans, also," Kirkness says.

Studying dog families also helps get a better handle on their own health and help eliminate dog diseases.

"Testing can be done by breeders to limit the passage of these mutations into future generations." Having a genetic map may also mean owners of pure-bred dogs and mutts may soon be able to document which breeds their dogs come from by simply sending a cheek swab or blood sample to a genetics lab. BACKGROUND: For the first time ever, scientists have successfully sequenced the entire genomic structures of two dog breeds: the boxer and the poodle. This is a major step forward for research in such fields as veterinary medicine. Extending this work to the human genome could help doctors better understand and fight human diseases and illnesses, including cancer research. THE

STUDY: In a new study, scientists at the Institute for Genomic Research found distinct genetic differences between boxer and poodle dog breeds, and went on to compare those variations in the genomes from nine other breeds, as well as the genomes from four types of wolves and a coyote. They did this by tracking short stretches of DNA that occur randomly, called short interspersed elements (SINEs), which often turn the expression of those genes up, down or even off. Ultimately they found that the overall dog population contains at least 20,000 differences. THE

IMPLICATIONS: For genomics researchers, variable SINEs can act as signposts for specific genes linked to a disease or traits. Identifying those genes is easier to do in dogs because they have been selectively bred for so long, creating the highest degree of physical and behavioral differences seen within a species. A dog genome is estimated to include 19,300 genes, and nearly all of them correspond to similar human genes. Specific breeds are predisposed, for instance, to heart disease, cancer, blindness, deafness, and other common disorders. A second study documented many of those disease-related differences.

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Better Marker for Breast Cancer May Reduce Need for Second Surgeries

A new material could help surgeons more accurately locate breast cancers, reduce the need for second surgeries and minimize pre-surgical discomfort for patients. Microscopic gas-filled spheres of silica, a porous glass, can mark the location of early-stage tumors to show their position using ultrasound imaging in the operating room.

A team of chemists, radiologists and surgeons at the University of California, San Diego, created the new material, which they describe in a forthcoming issue of the journal MedChemComm.
The X-rays used to make mammograms reveal calcium deposits associated with breast cancer even in tumors too small to be felt. But surgeons can't use X-rays while operating. Instead, radiologists place guide wires into tumors hours or even the day before surgery. The wires don't mark depth well and can shift. Patients find them both uncomfortable and unsettling.

As an alternative, the researchers created spheres of silica and filled them with perfluoropentane, a gas that has been used before in short-lived contrast materials for medical imaging. The rigid silica shells help the new material last longer.

"These little gas-filled microbubbles stick to human breast tissue for days and can be seen with ultrasound," said William Trogler, professor chemistry. "If doctors placed them in early stage breast cancer, which is difficult to see during surgery, they could help surgeons remove all of it in the first operation."

In the past few years, radiologists have tried implanting radioactive "seeds" instead of wires to mark tumors, but the seeds last only a few hours and must be inserted with a large-bore needle, which is painful. In addition, only one abnormal region can be marked, but patients with a form of breast cancer called ductal in situ carcinoma often have several. The seeds also expose both patient and staff to radiation, can't been imaged in three dimensions and create radioactive medical waste.

At just two micrometers in diameter - half the width of a strand of spider silk - small silica microbubbles can be precisely injected into clusters of abnormal cells using a thin needle. Radiologists would be able to inject the durable material days before surgery. And ultrasound scans reveal the position of the bubble in three dimensions on the operating table.

"Instead of just using a Geiger-counterlike device to say you're getting closer to the radioactive seed, you could actually see where to carve," said Andrew Kummel, professor of chemistry. The increased precision should help surgeons avoid the need for second surgeries.

"By outlining the tumor more completely in multiple directions, the particles could potentially help surgeons remove non-palpable tumors in a single operation," said Sarah Blair, a surgeon at Moores UCSD Cancer Center. "They will definitely make the operation more comfortable for patients."

The researchers think the ultrasound pressure waves burst the microbubbles. "They're thin, fragile balls of porous glass, like Christmas tree ornaments," Kummel said. "The shell is just one two-hundredth of the diameter of the ball. When it breaks, the gas squirts out. Doppler ultrasound detects that movement."
Nano-scale silica microbubbles, which the team reports in this paper as well, are too small to remain in place, but might drain from a cancerous site to help identify which lymph nodes are most likely to contain stray cells that could help the cancer spread.
The current study demonstrates the feasibility of the technology in tissue samples. Tests in animal models are underway, and toxicology studies must also be completed before clinical trials in humans could begin.

Chemists Bill Trogler, and Andy Kummel, of UCSD's Division of Physical Sciences, and radiologist Robert Mattrey and surgeon Sarah Blair of the Moores UCSD Cancer Center led the project. Additional co-authors include radiologist Yuko Kono, and Sergio Sandoval, Moores UCSD Cancer Center; Paul Martinez of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry; and Jessica Wang-Rodriguez of the Department of Pathology.

The National Cancer Institute provided financial support for this study.

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