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Science Update
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| Quick Test To
Determine Wheat Color Class
Even though baking and milling characteristics of hard red and white wheat
varieties differ markedly, the two types are difficult to distinguish visually.
Wet weather and other environmental factors can add to this difficulty. So
grain elevator operators should welcome a test that uses a dilute sodium
hydroxide solution to accentuate color differences of wheat seeds. It takes
just 10 minutes to correctly determine a wheat sample's class with this
test—and it costs just pennies to run. Its use should help make grain
marketers better able to ensure that Asian purchasers receive the white wheats
needed for making yellow noodles and that domestic bakers get the red wheats
typically used for baking breads.
While the idea for this testing method isn't new, research was needed to
standardize the procedure to make it a reliable indicator. The project was
funded by the Kansas Wheat Commission and administered through the Grain
Industry Alliance. The test kits cost about $100 and contain enough sodium
hydroxide to last through harvest. They are available from Perten Instruments
or from the Kansas Grain and Feed Association, Topeka, Kansas.
Floyd Dowell, USDA-ARS
Grain Marketing and Production Research
Center, Manhattan, Kansas; phone (785) 776-2753.
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Oats yield an oil that
may make a heart-healthy
bread.
(K3544-3)
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Oat Oil for Healthier Bread
Just a smidgen of oat oil could one day replace vegetable shortening and other
additives used by bakers to increase loaf size, improve texture, and lengthen
the shelf life of bread. This natural oil is rich in phosopholipids and
glycolipids, which are also called polar lipids. It combines with water to
lubricate bread dough to help it rise evenly and bake into a loaf that's
uniformly soft and springy—even after several days of storage. Bread made
with oat oil or its components could become an alternative dietary staple for
people who would rather avoid vegetable shortenings, which contain trans fatty
acids associated with heart disease.
The most highly valued major component of oats is presently the bran. Although
oat oil makes up about 6 percent of most dehulled oats, it is rarely sold
commercially. So its use as a baking ingredient could one day create a new
market for oats.
Douglas C. Doehlert,
USDA-ARS Red River Valley Agricultural
Research Center, Fargo, North Dakota; phone (701) 239-1413.
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| Poultry Manure +
Industrial Wastes=Better Fertilizer
What do you get if you add wastes from water-treatment plants and industrial
plants to poultry litter consisting of manure and sawdust? A safer
fertilizer—that's what.
Alum in the water-treatment residues and iron in certain industrial residues
strongly bind with phosophorus in the manure. This reduces water-soluble
phosphorus concentrations, making them much less likely to wash into waterways.
And the water-treatment residues also contain liming materials that can make
soil less acidic. Poultry manure treated with these byproducts can improve poor
soil inexpensively and help farmers continue to use poultry litter as
fertilizer.
Reducing phosphorus in waterways may reduce outbreaks of the microbe
Pfiesteria piscidida in tributaries of Maryland's Chesapeake Bay and
other coastal waters where outbreaks occur. Farmers with soil measured at the
highest levels of water-soluble phosphorus will eventually be prohibited from
applying poultry litter or other phosphorous fertilizer until levels subside.
The findings have been published in the Journal of Environmental
Quality. Testing of the litter-byproduct mixtures will next be done in corn
and soybean fields on the long-established poultry farms on the Chesapeake
watershed that are being studied.
Eton E. Codling, USDA-ARS
Environmental Quality
Laboratory, Beltsville, Maryland; phone (301) 504-5708.
Arabidopsis—An Even More Reliable Plant Model
Scientists recently announced not only the first complete sequence of a plant
genome, but also a computational analysis for the flowering wild plant
Arabidopsis thaliana. These accomplishments should make this diminutive
plant a more reliable genetic model for other plant species. It's the big
payoff of the finding. This will allow researchers to compare genes across
widely divergent crop species—such as grasses (rice and other grains) and
broad-leaved plants (soybeans, fruits, and vegetables). Arabidopsis was
chosen because it has one of the smallest—and seemingly one of the
simplest—genomes among flowering plants.
However, applying some novel computations to the Arabidopsis genome
showed its ancestry to be more complex than suspected. Scientists found that it
had duplicated at least four times—about 100 to 200 million years ago,
before the time when many of our broad-leaved crop plants began to diverge from
Arabidopsis' distant ancestor. Duplications add to the difficulty of
locating related chromosome sections in other plants because the genome gets
shuffled—like a deck of cards—naturally, over millions of years of
evolution.
Todd J. Vision, USDA-ARS Center for
Agricultural Bioinformatics, Ithaca, New York; phone (607) 254-5353. |
| "Science Update" was published
in the May
2001 issue of Agricultural Research magazine.
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Last Modified: 03/18/2005
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