California Fruit and Vegetable

Tag: ARS

  • Ensuring Availability of High-Quality Potatoes All Year Round

    Tubers of four Russet potato cultivars (Russet Burbank, Umatilla Russet, Bannock Russet, Dakota Russet) are being monitored under controlled environmental conditions for dormancy progression and sprout growth patterns during postharvest storage. (Photo by Munevver Dogramaci, USDA-ARS, Fargo, ND.)

    Scientists at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) use innovative technology to study the lifecycle of potatoes (including development, production, and postharvest storage), ensuring a high-quality supply year-round for snack food processing facilities, restaurants, and grocery stores.

    Potatoes are one of the main crops grown in the U.S., with a production of approximately 22.5 million tons annually. Fall is the primary season for harvesting potatoes, accounting for 90 percent of the total production. Since many locations cannot support year-round potato cultivation, most potatoes intended for processing, such as frozen french fries or instant mashed potatoes, are harvested in the fall and safely stored until needed. Storing and maintaining potatoes at their top nutritional quality while meeting consumer and market demands is essential for the industry.

    Yet, potato producers face several critical challenges, including climate- and disease-related challenges during crop production and long-term storage. Maintenance of post-harvest quality is of prime concern to the potato industry because post-harvest crop losses through physiological and disease-related processes routinely reach 10-15 percent. These challenges include factors such as early sprouting, as well as slow wound-healing of potato tubers inadvertently damaged during the operational process.

    Have you opened your home pantry and found potatoes sprouting? Immediately after harvest and for an indeterminate period thereafter, potato tubers are physiologically dormant and will not sprout even when they are placed in growth promoting conditions. The length of tuber dormancy period is determined by the genetics of the potato cultivar, and environmental conditions during the crop production and post-harvest storage—including temperature, humidity, light, and air composition. Premature sprouting or incomplete wound-healing adversely affects potato processing quality and nutritional value, resulting in lower producer prices or even complete market rejection by the industry and fresh market.

    Munevver Dogramaci, a research plant physiologist and lead scientist of the Potato Research Program at the Edward T. Schafer Agricultural Research Center in Fargo, North Dakota, and Darrin Haagenson research plant physiologist at the Potato Research Worksite in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, collaborate with growers and universities to address  these post-harvest physiological challenges, as well as to evaluate advanced potato breeding material for postharvest storage, food quality, and safety characteristics.

    “Currently, there is no method that is 100 percent efficient to control the physical deterioration of the potato tubers during storage,” said Dogramaci. “Potato tubers are at their peak nutritional quality during harvest, but it is essential to store them under specific conditions to maintain this quality.”

    A better understanding of physiological processes will help scientists improve post-harvest storage methods, preserving nutritional value, processing quality, and the marketability of potatoes.

    Dogramaci also noted that unintended wounding of tubers, like cuts and bruises, can also occur during harvest and post-harvest operations. “This results in rapid quality loss that impacts the tuber’s texture, ability to retain water, and an increase in its susceptibility to diseases during storage,” Dogramaci explained.

    Paul J. Collins, a research geneticist for the ARS Eastern potato breeding program based in Orono and Presque Isle, Maine, is working to develop new varieties for chip processing and table markets with improved agronomic attributes, disease resistance, climate resiliency, and quality traits. Successful varieties developed by this program include Atlantic, a variety that is widely grown across the U.S. for potato chips and is within the top ten most popular potato varieties grown in the nation.

    “Potato breeding seeks to identify new potato varieties that can provide benefits throughout the value chain,” said Collins. “Farmers can benefit from disease resistance traits, resilience to climate variability, and improved yields. Processors and retailers are interested in maintaining quality and uniformity. Consumers are driven by improved nutrition and flavor. Within the breeding program, we see huge variability for all of these traits. The challenge and fun of potato breeding is finding a new variety which makes everyone in the value chain happy.”

    Want to learn more? Watch the latest episode of “Cooking with Science“! USDA-ARS scientists share exciting facts about their work while Chef Mark Mills demonstrates how to incorporate potatoes into safe and nutritious recipes!

    USDA-ARS scientists Charles Cantrell (Mississippi), Patricia Slininger (Illinois), and Tianbao Yang (Maryland) also do important work with potatoes.

    The Agricultural Research Service is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s chief scientific in-house research agency. Daily, ARS focuses on solutions to agricultural problems affecting America. Each dollar invested in U.S. agricultural research results in $20 of economic impact.

  • The Secret to Happiness May be in Eating Your Vegetables

    For centuries, humans have sought the recipe for happiness: Money? Love? Fame? The answer, it turns out, may be none of the above, but rather: vegetables. New research by a team of ARS scientists at the Grand Forks Human Nutrition Research Center in Grand Forks, ND, reveals that increasing the quantity of vegetables in a person’s diet, even briefly, can improve their overall sense of wellbeing. In a recent study, the scientists provided 75 people with the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommended number of servings of vegetables over 8 weeks, while a control group of study participants ate a diet with very little vegetable content. Study participants who ate the vegetables reported a statistically significant increase in their happiness; their counterparts did not. The effect also persisted for some time after the study ended, when the group eating vegetables had returned to a diet without many vegetables.

    Most Americans routinely eat less than the recommended quantity of vegetables, even though research shows that eating vegetables provides many health benefits. Part of the reason has to do with the brain’s reward circuits; some foods, including many that contain high levels of salt, fat, and other unhealthy ingredients, tend to be reinforcing — that is, the more of them that people eat, the more they want to eat. An earlier, related study that the ARS researchers conducted found that vegetables are not reinforcing, making it more challenging to motivate people to eat them. In response to that finding, the researchers decided to investigate whether there were ways they could make vegetables more reinforcing, to help people obtain the health benefits they offer. The researchers theorized that if they knew that vegetables made them feel better, people might be motivated to eat more of them.

    “We knew that vegetables were not going to make neurotransmitters fire in the brain like chocolate,” said Shanon Casperson, a research biologist at the Center, “but we thought, ‘Well, let’s see what we can do to help people think about vegetables differently.’”

    Consuming vegetables, like these organic heirloom tomatoes at the Jack London Square Farmers’ Market in Oakland, CA, can contribute to improved feelings of happiness. USDA photo by Lance Cheung.

    Using a popular 4-question survey called the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS), Casperson and her colleagues asked study participants to rate their agreement with statements like, “In general, I consider myself a very happy person,” and “Compared to most of my peers, I consider myself very happy.” The participants were given the survey repeatedly over the course of the study to capture any changes in their responses. While previous studies had shown a correlation between vegetable consumption and wellbeing, this study helped establish that the vegetables actually caused the improvement, because rather than just observing existing eating patterns, it changed them and measured the effects.

    The results were intriguing enough that the researchers plan to perform a similar study with other foods, examining whether pulses also improve feelings of happiness. For now, though, they believe that their study gives people one more reason to eat their vegetables.

    “The take-home message for a study like this is so simple,” said Casperson. “If you increase your vegetables, it can have a positive impact on your mental wellbeing. That’s such a powerful message, and it’s something that is within people’s control.”

    Read ARS’s press release about the study. — By Kathryn Markham, USDA ARS Office of Communications

  • Could Stingrays be the Key to Saving Citrus from Deadly HLB Disease?

    Imagine a devastating plant disease that sweeps the land, decimating crops. For Florida’s citrus growers, that apocalyptic vision is not a horror movie, but a reality: since it was first identified in the Sunshine State in 2005, citrus greening disease has reduced Florida’s citrus production by a whopping 70%, and threatened other major citrus producing states such as California and Texas. Without any treatment or cure available, desperate growers have cut down infected trees or abandoned their groves entirely. Scientists have been racing to come up with a solution. Now, one enterprising team believes it may have one, in the form of: stingrays.

    Like other organisms, stingrays have an immune system. Unlike most organisms, however, the rays’ system produces an antibody with a functional domain that is both far smaller and more stable than most. These special antibodies, or nanobodies – termed “mantabodies” by the research team – are specialized proteins that can help other organisms fight off infection. Essentially, the researchers plan to treat the rays as a sort of all-purpose pharmacy, where they can introduce a novel pathogen like the citrus greening bacteria, and the rays will generate an immune response specific to that pathogen. The genetic material (gene) encoding this specifically-targeted antibody can then be placed in modified plant cells that grow as a symbiont – an organism that lives in a close, mutually beneficial relationship with the diseased organism.

    Alternatively, researchers can culture the modified plant cells in large vessels and then harvest the antibodies that the cells produce for inoculation into citrus trees. The resulting antibody therapy would prevent or cure disease development in the trees. The approach could, in theory, be applied to other organisms too, and the researchers plan to use the technology to target pathogens that invade farmed fish, honey bees, and more.

    This project was a 2022 winner of ARSX, an annual competition that asks ARS scientists to propose innovative, high-risk, high-reward ideas that cross disciplines and break boundaries to solve our most pressing challenges.

    A southern stingray, Hypnum americanus, swims along the seabed. (Photo courtesy of Matt Ajemian, Ph.D., director of the Fisheries Ecology and Conservation Lab at FAU-HBOI)

    The project team includes researchers from ARS, the Florida Atlantic University Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, in Fort Pierce, FL, and the and U.S. Department of Energy Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Educationin Oak Ridge, TN. Team member and ARS research molecular biologist Michelle Heck is using USDA’s SCINet high performance computing clusters to analyze the stingray genomes, and she is applying a powerful artificial intelligence (AI) approach called AlphaFold to identify the mantabody genes.

    “Using AlphaFold, which was just released two years ago, we can rapidly and accurately predict the shape of all the stingray proteins,” explained Heck, who works at ARS’s Robert W. Holley Center in Ithaca, NY, “And we can find the ones that look most like what we think a mantabody protein should look like.”

    The researchers are also taking advantage of other advances in biotechnology, like the mRNA technique that was used to deliver Covid-19 vaccines. They believe that their project could, in turn, advance biotechnology even farther.

    “You can modify almost anything with an antibody treatment,” said Joseph Krystel, a team member and research biologist at the ARS U.S. Horticultural Research Lab (USHRL) in Fort Pierce, FL. “You could stimulate the immune system of a citrus tree, or you could suppress a particular set of genes if you wanted to. The reason we don’t do it now is that it’s cost-prohibitive. But the mantabody platform could give us a more cost-effective way to do it.”

    It could also provide farmers with more sustainable biological alternatives to many current practices. Robert Shatters, a team member and research molecular biologist at the USHRL, explained that, “Mantabodies could be applied to veterinary aspects of agriculture, and a number of plant pathogen issues. We think this project would have a really broad impact, and that’s why we’re excited about it.” – By Kathryn Markham, USDA-ARS Office of Communications

  • ARS Team Fights Blueberry Virus to Help Growers Keep Fruit on the Shelves

    In the United States, blueberries are the second-most produced berry, and their popularity has grown exponentially in less than 30 years – up from 45,000 tons grown in the 1990s to 339,000 tons in 2019. ARS researchers are working hard to help farmers keep up with consumer demand.

    Researchers at the Horticultural Crops Production and Genetic Improvement Research (HPCGIR) Unit in Corvallis, OR, are developing new cultivars of not just blueberry, but also blackberry, red raspberry, black raspberry, and strawberry to meet the needs of western growers.

    “In blueberry, we focus on improving the shelf life of fruit so that it reaches consumers with consistently better texture and flavor,” said Claire Luby, plant geneticist with HCPGIR. “This also means developing new types of blueberries that are easier to harvest using mechanical harvesting equipment.”

    Blueberries are notorious for being difficult to harvest with machinery because they bruise so easily.

    Perhaps a larger challenge for Luby and her colleagues is developing a cultivar that is resistant to a disease known to be a scourge of the berry: blueberry shock virus.

    “We’re studying diverse blueberry plants to understand the genetic basis for blueberry shock virus, which can significantly impact yields for farmers,” she said. “Our hope is to use the insights from this project to develop new cultivars that are resistant, or at least more tolerant to, the disease.”

    Blueberry shock virus has caused annual crop losses of 34-90% in the Pacific Northwest.

    “The fruits that we focus on in this project are some of the most consumed fruits in the United States and contribute important nutritional benefits to consumers,” Luby said. The fruits are also economically important to the region, with Washington and Oregon being the nation’s top two producers.

    According to Luby, researchers combine traditional plant breeding with genomics to find the right genetic mix for their disease-resistant cultivars.

    Their plant breeding programs use traditional techniques of taking pollen from one plant and using it to pollinate a different plant with complementary characteristics. They then determine if the progeny of these crosses have the new characteristics that meet the goals of the breeding programs. In general, these techniques have been used in one form or another by people trying to improve agricultural crops for millennia.

    “Where the genomics piece comes in is to try to improve the accuracy and speed of the plant breeding process,” Luby explained. “We are now able to obtain a lot more genetic information about the plants and we can use that information to potentially predict whether an offspring of a given cross might have the characteristics we are looking for before we plant it out in the field. This is important because it can increase the speed of the plant breeding process.”

    Traditional blueberry breeding can take more than 20 years from the time an initial cross is made to when a consumer might eat from a resulting cultivar.

    “Our goals are to develop blueberries that require fewer chemical inputs to fight disease, which can be better for both the environment and for growers’ bottom lines,” Luby said. – By Scott Elliott, USDA-ARS Office of Communications

  • Breeding a Better Potato for a Better Potato Chip

    Photo courtesy of Potatoes USA.

    Potato chips are America’s classic snack: crunchy, salty, greasy and tasting of potato or flavored with sour cream, vinegar, BBQ, maple bacon or Cajun dill. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Americans eat more potato chips than any other nation; more than four pounds a person a year, according to Potatoes USA. About 22 percent of the U.S. potato crop—nearly 7,500 million pounds annually—are made into chips. Consumers spend more than $7 billion dollars buying potato chips at retailers. And USDA’s Agricultural Research Service helps ensure that the country always has the perfect potato for frying into chips.

    ARS’ potato breeding program has already produced some major winners in the potato chip category. One is Atlantic, a variety ARS developed and released in 1976, that remains the number two chipping variety in the United States.

    But potato producers have been ready for an Atlantic replacement for years. Atlantic is vulnerable to internal heat necrosis, where darker spots or flecks form in the flesh of the potato particularly in sandy soils during warm, dry seasons. It is also susceptible to Hollow Heart, a condition in which a hollow depression forms in the center of the potato when moisture levels are very uneven while the potatoes are growing.

    “But diseases and pests keep evolving, so we need to keep breeding new varieties to stay ahead of them,” explained Research Geneticist Richard Novy, with the Small Grains and Potato Germplasm Research Unit in Aberdeen, Idaho.

    Every year, scientists in the ARS potato breeding program make thousands of chipping potato crosses with an eye to improving not only disease and pest resistance, but also achieving perfect potato chip color and proper sugar levels, good storage ability and a whole host of superior agronomic traits such as yield, time to harvest and tuber size.

    Novy has a very promising new chipping potato in the pipeline at Aberdeen, known right now as A13125-3C, which is showing much potential in Idaho and in the National Chip Processing Trial (NCPT). ARS participates alongside universities and industry in the NCPT, which is run through Potatoes USA, to test potatoes simultaneously at sites all over the country.

    A13125-3C won’t get a catchy variety name until after it successfully completes several years of trials and then goes through a tissue culture process to remove any viruses and bacteria to allow the production of certified seed for producers.

    “By sharing access to germplasm and testing nationally, you can more quickly identify candidates having variety potential for the chipping industry,” Novy said. “Such a program helps regional chip companies to identify promising new potato varieties for their production of chips.”

    Across the country from the Aberdeen lab, ARS Plant Research Geneticist Paul Collins in Orono, Maine, is concentrating on breeding chipping potatoes with better disease resistance for eastern potato growers. One major focus is potatoes that can better withstand Late Blight, a fungal disease that causes an annual loss of $210 million.

    “Most diseases we are working on can affect the farmer’s ability to produce a potato crop and they can have a staggering economic impact,” Collins said. “Potato Virus Y, for example, causes annual losses of $103 million in yield and tuber quality.

    While ARS scientists are breeding potatoes to fight diseases, most consumers do not have to worry about their snack being affected by any of these viruses. The chipping varieties for the snack aisle, usually Atlantic, Snowden and Lamoka, are not found in the grocery store’s produce bins.

    “Our goal is to breed potato varieties which are resistant to these diseases, and with other agronomic traits that are important to farmers while also having quality traits like color, shape and size that are important to consumers and processors,” Collins said.

    The Agricultural Research Service is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s chief scientific in-house research agency. Daily, ARS focuses on solutions to agricultural problems affecting America. Each dollar invested in U.S. agricultural research results in $20 of economic impact.

  • Researchers Harness the Sun’s Rays to Fight Strawberry Disease

    While not exactly the stuff of sci-fi movies, scientists have developed a “ray gun” that emits a light hazardous to a pestilence that devastates many types of crops. Fumiomi Takeda, a research horticulturalist, and Wojciech Janisiewicz, retired research plant pathologist, from the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Innovative Fruit Production, Improvement, and Protection unit in Kearneysville, WV, led a team that used shortwave ultraviolent light (UV-C) to kill powdery mildew fungus.

    UV-C is a very specific part of the ultraviolet light spectrum. UV-C is produced by the sun but does not reach Earth’s surface because it is absorbed by the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere. That’s a good thing, because UV-C is harmful to humans and plants when exposed to excessive amounts or for a long time.

    “We conducted research to administer UV-C on powdery mildew-infected strawberry plants without causing harmful effects on the plant, such as leaf burn, fruit softening, or color darkening to determine whether it would be a good alternative to controlling powdery mildew with pesticides,” Takeda said.

    On strawberry plants, powdery mildew appears as white powdery spots or fuzzy growth on both sides of leaves and on stems. Moderate to severe infection reduces the ability of leaves to employ photosynthesis – the process that plants use to synthesize foods from carbon dioxide and water. Powdery mildew can kill flowers, harden immature fruit, and reduce fruit quality and marketable yields.

    If not controlled, the disease can cause a significant economic loss, especially to plants grown in greenhouses or high tunnels. In Japan and western Europe, where over 90% of strawberry production is in the greenhouse and under high tunnels, powdery mildew is the primary cause of fruit quality loss.

    UV-C light kills microorganisms (fungi, bacteria, and viruses) and even arthropod pests by damaging their DNA.

    According to Takeda and Janisiewicz, UV-C application is most effective at night because microbes and mites have a natural, light-activated special mechanism for repairing their damaged DNA. When UV-C is used during the day, high doses are needed to kill microbes, but those high doses are damaging to plants. To avoid this problem, they irradiated microbes with UV-C at night.

    “Night-time application of 30-60 seconds allowed for control of powdery mildew, botrytis gray mold, and anthracnose fruit rot causing fungal pathogens at much lower doses for an effective kill and, more importantly, below the threshold that causes damage to the strawberry plants,” Takeda said.

    A severe case of powdery mildew on a zinnia (Photo by Stephen Ausmus).

    In addition to strawberries, USDA scientists have used UV-C light on tomato plants and ornamental crops to control fungal pathogens and arthropod pests, such as greenhouse whitefly, flower thrips, and two-spotted spider mite.

    ARS collaborated with TRIC Robotics in Newark, DE, to design and test the UV-C application robots at multiple locations, including California, where they have been field tested for over 10 months. The UV-C, non-chemical approach for fungal and pest control has shown so much success that it is on the brink of widespread commercial application.

    “With the development of our autonomous UV-C application in the field, it is not so much a question of whether UV-C light treatments can be applied effectively, but how soon commercial platforms for UV-C application will be available to large and small strawberry growers across the country,” Takeda said. – By Scott Elliott, USDA ARS

  • New Food Freezing Concept Improves Quality, Increases Safety and Cuts Energy Use

    Shifting to a new food freezing method could make for safer and better quality frozen foods while saving energy and reducing carbon emissions, according to a new study by U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and University of California-Berkeley scientists.

    “A complete change over to this new method of food freezing worldwide could cut energy use by as much as 6.5 billion kilowatt-hours each year while reducing the carbon emissions that go along with generating that power by 4.6 billion kg, the equivalent of removing roughly one million cars from roads,” said ARS research food technologist Cristina Bilbao-Sainz. She is with the Healthy Processed Foods Research Unit, part of ARS’s Western Regional Research Center (WRRC) in Albany.

    “T­hese savings could be achieved without requiring any significant changes in current frozen food manufacturing equipment and infrastructure, if food manufacturers adopt this concept,” Bilbao-Sainz added.

    ARS scientists Cristina Bilbao-Sainz (right) and Roberto Avena-Bustillos demonstrate the use of isochoric freezing chambers. Photo: U.S. Department of Agriculture.

    The new freezing method, called isochoric freezing, works by storing foods in a sealed, rigid container—typically made of hard plastic or metal—completely filled with a liquid such as water. Unlike conventional freezing in which the food is exposed to the air and freezes solid at temperatures below 32 degrees F, isochoric freezing preserves food without turning it to solid ice.

    As long as the food stays immersed in the liquid portion, it is protected from ice crystallization, which is the main threat to food quality.

    “Energy savings come from not having to freeze foods completely solid, which uses a huge amount of energy, plus there is no need to resort to energy-intensive cold storage protocols such as quick freezing to avoid ice crystal formation,” Bilbao-Sainz said.

    Isochoric freezing also allows for higher quality storage of fresh foods such as tomatoes, sweet cherries and potatoes that are otherwise difficult to preserve with conventional freezing.

    Another benefit of isochoric freezing is that it also kills microbial contaminants during processing.

    “The entire food production chain could use isochoric freezing—everyone from growers to food processors, product producers to wholesalers, to retailers. The process will even work in a person’s freezer at home after they purchase a product—all without requiring any major investments in new equipment,” said WRRC center director Tara McHugh, co-leader of this study. “With all of the many potential benefits, if this innovative concept catches on, it could be the next revolution in freezing foods.”

    UC-Berkeley biomedical engineer Boris Rubinsky, co-leader of this project, first developed the isochoric freezing method to cryopreserve tissues and organs for transplants.

    Since then, ARS and UC-Berkeley have applied for a joint patent for applying isochoric freezing to preserving food. The research team is now developing the best applications for this technology in the frozen foods industry, especially scaling up the technology to an industrial level. They also are seeking commercial partners to help transfer the technology to the commercial sector.

    UC-Berkeley mechanical engineer Matthew Powell-Palm, one of the lead authors of the study paper, noted that “isochoric freezing is a cross-cutting technology with promising applications in not only the food industry, but in medicine, biology, even space travel.”

    WRRC has also been designated a National Historic Chemical Landmark in 2002 by the American Chemical Society for developing the Time-Temperature Tolerance studies, which made possible the production of stable, safe and high quality frozen food, revolutionizing the industry in the 1950s.

    This research was published in Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews.

    The Agricultural Research Service is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s chief scientific in-house research agency. Daily, ARS focuses on solutions to agricultural problems affecting America. Each dollar invested in agricultural research results in $17 of economic impact.

  • Pickling Cucumbers Fused with Health Promoting Compound

    Pickling cucumber not only extends their shelf-life, but also offers health benefits.

    Researchers at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and North Carolina State University (NCSU) recently found that a stable, naturally occurring, health-promoting compound called γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA), was generated through the fermentation of brined cucumbers. Previous research studies demonstrate that consumption of GABA from foods or supplements has positive health benefits like reducing blood pressure, improving decision making, reducing anxiety, and boosting immunity.

    Researchers demonstrated that low-salt fermentation enhances GABA content in pickled cucumber products prepared for direct consumption. Also, fermenting them in lower salt brines and storing them in their original fermented juices increases the GABA levels.

    “Fruits and vegetables are made up of thousands of unique molecules. These molecules rule the flavor, texture, and nutritional value, but it is difficult to study them in such complex systems.” said Suzanne Johanningsmeier, ARS Research Food Technologist. “To tackle this problem, we use advanced analytical chemistry techniques like mass spectrometry to study food molecules and figure out the best food processing methods for improved quality of fruit and vegetable products.”

    Fermentation is a process that’s been known for years as a very powerful tool toward food preservation. Some other well-known foods where GABA content has been enhanced through fermentation are sourdough bread, soy sauce and dairy products like yogurt, kefir, and certain cheeses.

    “Worldwide, people are interested in consuming fermented foods as part of a healthy lifestyle. Most often, we associate the healthfulness of fermented foods with probiotic microbes. But many fermented foods contain few to no microbes when consumed,” said Jennifer Fideler Moore, North Carolina State University Graduate Research Assistant. “Our research shows that the health-promoting potential of lactic acid fermented cucumbers reaches far beyond the world of probiotics. This opens the door to more research into health-promoting compounds made during fermentation of fruits and vegetables.”

    The research, recently published in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis, also found that the health promoting compound GABA in pickled cucumbers did not break down during pasteurization and remained stable over at least 6-months storage time.

    The Agricultural Research Service is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s chief scientific in-house research agency. Daily, ARS focuses on solutions to agricultural problems affecting America. Each dollar invested in agricultural research results in $17 of economic impact.

  • An Organic Alternative to Combatting Spotted Wing Drosophila

    Scientists from the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) are working to understand how something can be equally effective as both a government-approved food additive and as a pesticide.

    Methyl benzoate is a naturally occurring compound produced by plants. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration long ago approved methyl benzoate for human use; its fruity and floral aroma makes it a staple in perfumes and cosmetics and as a food additive. Nature employs it to attract pollinators.

    While many insects find methyl benzoate appealing, Aijun Zhang, research chemist at the ARS Invasive Insect Biocontrol and Behavior Laboratory in Beltsville, MD, is investigating why some insects and non-insect pests find it revolting.

    From left, research chemist Aijun Zhang, postdoctoral Nick Larson, and intern Lauryn Brooks demonstrated research into methyl benzoate uses as a pesticide in an ARS poster day demonstration.

    Zhang’s research has focused on methyl benzoate’s utility as a pesticide for human protection and crop protection. So far, Zhang has documented that the compound will kill or repel many insects in various stages of development, including mosquitoes, bed bugs, fire ants, ticks, flies, moths, and the brown marmorated stink bug. Perhaps most important, however, is its ability to repel and kill the spotted wing drosophila fly (SWD). “SWD is the most significant invasive insect pest of soft-skinned fruit crops in the USA,” Zhang said.

    Since SWD was first detected in California a little over a decade ago, the fly has become a key pest in blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, and cherries. These crops have a combined annual value of over $5.8 billion, and farmers lose about $718 million annually to SWD damage.

    Farmers fight SWD with synthetic insecticides, but at prices up to $1,200 per acre, that method is expensive. It is costly in other ways, too, Zhang said; the synthetic insecticide is harmful to the environment, contributes to pesticide resistance, and may be harmful to humans.

    Because methyl benzoate is an environmentally friendly, bio-based compound, Zhang thinks it has great potential to be used by people for human protection as an alternative to synthetic pesticides. It also costs much less than synthetic pesticide treatments.

    According to Zhang, methyl benzoate shares the same “chemical skeleton” as DEET, the gold standard in arthropod repellency, a detail that is leading future research efforts.

    “Understanding the structure-activity relationship will allow researchers to modify the chemical structure of the methyl benzoate molecule to develop pesticides that are more efficient at controlling arthropod pests,” he said. — By Scott Elliott, USDA-ARS Office of Communications.

  • An Organic Alternative to Combatting Spotted Wing Drosophila

    Scientists from the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) are working to understand how something can be equally effective as both a government-approved food additive and as a pesticide.

    Methyl benzoate is a naturally occurring compound produced by plants. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration long ago approved methyl benzoate for human use; its fruity and floral aroma makes it a staple in perfumes and cosmetics and as a food additive. Nature employs it to attract pollinators.

    While many insects find methyl benzoate appealing, Aijun Zhang, research chemist at the ARS Invasive Insect Biocontrol and Behavior Laboratory in Beltsville, MD, is investigating why some insects and non-insect pests find it revolting.

    From left, research chemist Aijun Zhang, postdoctoral Nick Larson, and intern Lauryn Brooks demonstrated research into methyl benzoate uses as a pesticide in an ARS poster day demonstration.

    Zhang’s research has focused on methyl benzoate’s utility as a pesticide for human protection and crop protection. So far, Zhang has documented that the compound will kill or repel many insects in various stages of development, including mosquitoes, bed bugs, fire ants, ticks, flies, moths, and the brown marmorated stink bug. Perhaps most important, however, is its ability to repel and kill the spotted wing drosophila fly (SWD). “SWD is the most significant invasive insect pest of soft-skinned fruit crops in the USA,” Zhang said.

    Since SWD was first detected in California a little over a decade ago, the fly has become a key pest in blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, and cherries. These crops have a combined annual value of over $5.8 billion, and farmers lose about $718 million annually to SWD damage.

    Farmers fight SWD with synthetic insecticides, but at prices up to $1,200 per acre, that method is expensive. It is costly in other ways, too, Zhang said; the synthetic insecticide is harmful to the environment, contributes to pesticide resistance, and may be harmful to humans.

    Because methyl benzoate is an environmentally friendly, bio-based compound, Zhang thinks it has great potential to be used by people for human protection as an alternative to synthetic pesticides. It also costs much less than synthetic pesticide treatments.

    According to Zhang, methyl benzoate shares the same “chemical skeleton” as DEET, the gold standard in arthropod repellency, a detail that is leading future research efforts.

    “Understanding the structure-activity relationship will allow researchers to modify the chemical structure of the methyl benzoate molecule to develop pesticides that are more efficient at controlling arthropod pests,” he said. — By Scott Elliott, USDA-ARS Office of Communications.