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Thursday, April 30, 2015

Baking to the next level

Richard Hamming
Detroit Steve pokes a yeast cell:
    I've been on a bit of a search kick on foods that have copper affinity. It started with my use of cinnamon, I use it every day in my oatmeal and it is red so I wondered what made it red. Still no idea, but thought it could be copper. Not likely but still. Like Iron for the Irish, I was wondering if it could be possible poisonous in larger accumulated quantities.
    The Irish and iron premise is 8,000 years of isolation on Ireland with a soil devoid of iron, has made the Irish very good at pulling out any available iron in the foods to the point that a diet rich in iron will accumulates to toxic level such that it actually damages our hearts. Thus, giving blood is an important habit and necessary.
    Many foods have affinity to different elements, tobacco for lead and radon, rice has one for arsenic. Basically a strategy for survival for plants is a chemical approach, they are trying to find ways to kill or discourage anything that might eat it.
    The EFSA European Food Safety Authority put out a Scientific opinion on the inability to assess the safety of copper-enriched yeast added for nutritional purposes. I tried yeast additive in college, did not agree with me then.

So this lead to one of my favorite and Tyler's yeast; Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
​I was surprised but should not have been by the broad list of research that has been going on with this yeast.​
There is a Database devoted to it!
So I started to read one of the articles.
Right off the bat, it reminding me of the Dr. Strangelove plot.
They are playing around with the yeast to have it use a sugar found in wood. Keep in mind what three concepts I have in mind while reading this: the Richard Hamming story and the Atom bomb (igniting our atmosphere with and atom bomb), second why coal stopped forming (bacteria was able to digest cellulose) and third the garlic mustard in my yard starting to come up (invasive species that take over).
​It is all so unlikely it's funny. First assumption is there is a lot of xylose, I have no idea how much xylose sugar is out there. So this new version of our favorite yeast gets out and starts its fast consumption of all the xylose, what might happen?
I remember reading about a case of iron overload some years ago. The treatment they used then was blood letting. The man took the blood home and poured it on his roses.

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