Phagocytes feed by forming food vacuoles. In this article the authors investigate the extent that exposure of non-nutritional food, such as India Ink, to Tetrahymena pyriformis affects the number of vacuole formation. These studies provide insight to how organisms budget their energy and metabolic processes during an energy shortage.

In organic synthesis, protecting groups are derivatives of reactive functionalities that play a key role in ensuring chemoselectivity of chemical transformations. To protect alcohols and amines, acid-labile tert-butyloxycarbonyl protecting groups are often employed but are avoided when the substrate is acid-sensitive. Thus, orthogonal base-labile protecting groups have been in demand to enable selective deprotection and to preserve the reactivity of acid-sensitive substrates. To meet this demand, we present 4-nitrophenyl carbonates and carbamates as orthogonal base-labile protecting group strategies.

The authors compared the short-term effects of processed versus unprocessed food on spatial learning and survival in zebrafish, given the large public concern regarding processed foods. By randomly assigning zebrafish to a diet of brine shrimp flakes (processed) or live brine shrimp (unprocessed), the authors show while there is no immediate effect on a fish's decision process between the two diets, there are significant correlations between improved learning and stress response with the unprocessed diet.

The authors looked at the ability to grow S. platensis on a larger scale with reduced cost given that it is currently quite expensive to grow, but poses as an important food source in the future.

Dental resins can be a source of reactive oxygen species (ROS) which in unruly amounts can be toxic to cellular and overall health. In this report, the authors test whether the consumption of antioxidant rich foods like avocado and asparagus can protect against the effect of dental resin-derived ROS. However, rather than testing humans, they use fruit flies and their climbing abilities as an experimental readout.

T. pyriformis can use phagocytosis to create vacuoles of carmine red, a dye which is made using crushed insects and is full of nutrients. Establishing a relationship between vacuole formation and duration of exposure to food can demonstrate how phagocytosis occurs in T. pyriformis. We hypothesized that if T. pyriformis was incubated in a carmine red solution, then more vacuoles would form over time in each cell.

Enzyme chemotaxis is a thermodynamic phenomenon in which enzymes move along a substrate concentration gradient towards regions with higher substrate concentrations and can be used to steer nanovehicles towards targets along natural substrate concentrations. In patients with Alzheimer’s disease, a gradient of tau protein forms in the bloodstream. Tau protein is a substrate of the enzyme CDK5, which catalyzes the phosphorylation of tau protein and can travel using chemotaxis along tau protein gradients to increasing concentrations of tau and amyloid-beta proteins. The authors hypothesized that CDK5 would be able to overcome these barriers of Brownian motion and developed a quantitative model using Michaelis-Menten kinetics to define the necessary parameters to confirm and characterize CDK5’s chemotactic behavior to establish its utility in drug delivery and other applications.

Seeking to investigate eco-friendly biological methods to control weeds and enhance food crop yields, here the authors considered the effects of three essential oils on seed germination and radicle length of both a weed and a common crop. They found that treatment with turmeric oil had phytotoxic potential, leading to a reduction in both seed germination and radicle length of the weed. In contrast, ginger oil possessed allelopathic properties towards both. The authors suggest that essential oils could be used as eco-friendly bio-herbicides.

Mealworms (Tenebrio molitor) are important food sources for reptiles, birds, and other organisms, as well as for humans. However, the slow growth and low survival rate of mealworms cause problems for mass production. Since alloferon, a synthetic peptide, showed long-term immunological effects on mealworms, we hypothesized that alloferon would function as a growth promoter to maximize mealworm production. We discovered that the overall weight of the alloferon-containing gelatin diet group was 39.5-90% heavier, and the development time of the experimental group was shortened up to 20.6-39.6% than the control group.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are crops or animals that have been genetically engineered to express a certain physical or biological characteristic and have various benefits that have made them become increasingly popular. However, the public has had mixed reactions to the use of GMOs, with some skeptical of their safety. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how opinions on genetically modified foods can change from exposure to small amounts of information