Rice R&D News:http://surge.ng/discovery-researchers-says-consuming-these-high-fibre-diet-could-fight-flu/

iscovery: See What Researchers Says About Consuming High-Fibre Diets!

By

 Adim Clare

 -

May 15, 2018

Discovery: Researchers Says, Consuming These High-Fibre Diet Could Fight Flu!/ Photo Credit: maionline

Influenza [flu] is one of the universal and most viral infections that is affecting up to 20 per cent of the world’s population yearly. A diet high in fibre could protect against flu by boosting the immune system.

A study has found recently that diet high in fibre could boost the immune system and therefore protect against flu.

According to researchers, eating more of oats, brown rice and raspberries, could increase the body’s antiviral immune response because of its nutrients.

ALSO READ: Eat Right: Boost And Increase Your Fertility Chances With These Foods

Also reducing the risk associated with heart disease and diabetes, are other benefits derived from the consumption of high-fibre.  However, researchers now hope it could help fight against flu.

According to scientists at Australia’s Monash University, High levels of dietary fibre reduce the effects of asthma and allergies on the lungs while also making the body more resistant to viruses

The research carried out

Researchers carried out a test using mice, made them consume more fibre and it was discovered that they are protected from being infected with flu.

This created a kind of awareness to the teams that, dietary fibre may be of great advantage to people with inflammatory lung conditions, for instance; asthma or allergies, but at the same time worried it would ‘switch off’ other immune responses.

From the research, it was discovered that while it helps in the reduction of swelling in the lungs, it also activates white blood cells- which boost the mice’s antiviral immunity resulting to protecting them from influenza.

The study was published in the journal Immunity.

‘Western diet could weaken immune system’

The modern Western diet could be reducing the body’s ability to protect against infections because it is high in sugar and fat but low in fibre, the scientists said.

Flu is a common virus and most people are able to recover on their own but some people, such as those with weakened immune systems and the elderly, can have more serious symptoms.

‘We typically find that a certain treatment turns our immune system either on or off,’ says senior study author Benjamin Marsland.

‘What surprised us was that dietary fibre was selectively turning off part of our immune system, while turning on another, completely unrelated part of our immune system.’

A need for human research

Marsland has called for more research into how much fibre, and what type of fibre, would be most effective in boosting viral immunity in humans.

Dietary fibre comes from plant-based carbohydrates that are not able to be digested in the small intestine so make their way to the large intestine or colon.

Though, Marsland and his team plan to research how changes in the diet can change the immune system, particularly in the lungs.

According to Marsland , ‘There is a need for carefully designed and controlled studies in humans to address how these findings could benefit people with asthma, or for preventing viral infections.’

‘We should also look further into these pathways as a means of supplementing other therapies or enhancing vaccine efficacy.’

High-fibre diet can protect against heart disease, diabetes and cancer

Previous research has concluded that higher dietary fibre intake is associated with a lower risk of death including of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer.

Dietary fibre helps to maintain good heart health by reducing levels of cholesterol in the blood, which is considered to be a risk factor for heart disease.

Inflammation also contributes to disease and research has shown fibre may have a role to play in modulating the immune system and so reducing disease risk.

There is good evidence to show that a diet high in fibre may help to prevent Type 2 diabetes.

For those with the condition, eating a diet rich in fibre can help to balance blood sugar levels.

Fibre also helps to bulk out the diet and promote fullness that may help with weight loss, which can help with the condition.

ALSO READ: Do you Want To Loose Weight? Then Try Eating This….

QUESTION: WHICH FOODS ARE HIGH IN FIBRE?

The below foods are good sources of dietary fibre:

-Oat bran

-Black beans

-All bran breakfast cereal

-Lentils (cooked)

-Adzuki beans (cooked)

-Red kidney beans (cooked)

-Pearl barley (cooked)

-Quinoa (cooked)

-Oats

-Wholemeal spaghetti (cooked)

-Brown rice

-Aubergine

-Brussels sprouts

-Linseeds

-Raspberries

-Granary bread

-Dried figs

-Almonds

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Are you frequently disturbed by flu, why not try eating these foods rich in fibre?

Source: mailonline

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Rice R&D News:https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/farming-technique-using-drastically-less-water-is-catching-on_us_5af41876e4b0859d11d0ae35

A New Farming Technique Using Drastically Less Water Is Catching On

But not everyone is on board.

By John Vidal

AMIT DAVE/REUTERS

A farmworker in a rice paddy field in Ahmedabed, India. An unconventional method for growing rice has been found to increase yields by 20 to 50 percent.

Filipino melon grower Denis Miguel was intrigued to hear of a young Indian farmer who in 2011 had broken the world record for growing rice by using an unconventional method of cultivation that needed only half as much water and one-tenth as many seeds but resulted in spectacular yield increases.

Miguel, from Isabela province, had never grown rice before, but he teamed up with a local rice farmer to try out the system. Last year, he reaped the equivalent of 10.8 tons of rice per hectare, or four times as much rice as the farmer usually grew on that land.

He was astonished. “A harvest of 10.8 tons per hectare on a rain-fed farm which used to produce only 2.5 tons was a great success. I was a newbie rice farmer. It was my first attempt at rice farming. It was an eye opener to all the people who were witness,” he said in an email.

Miguel is not alone. Reports from China, India, Southeast Asia and Africa suggest that average yield increases of 20 to 50 percent are regularly being achieved by farmers adopting the “system of rice intensification” (SRI), which aims to stimulate the root system of plants rather than trying to increase yields in the conventional way by using improved seeds and synthetic fertilizers.

Rice is the major staple crop of nearly half the world and is primarily grown by small farmers. Seedlings are traditionally planted in large clumps in flooded fields. One kilogram of rice typically requires about 660 gallons of water.

SRI, in contrast, involves the careful spacing of fewer but younger plants, keeping the topsoil around the plants well-aerated by weeding, using manure and avoiding flooding. 

PARTHAJIT DATTA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

An Indian farmer drags a wooden plank to level soil as he works in a paddy field in Agartala, India. Many Indian farmers are adopting SRI to increase the productivity of rice by changing the management of plants, soil, water and nutrients.

What was a grassroots movement spreading slowly by word of mouth since it was developed by French priest Henri de Laulanié in Madagascar in 1983 is now growing fast as regional governments in China and India join anti-poverty groups like Oxfam to back the method.

According to the SRI International Network and Resources Center at Cornell University, an estimated 10 million rice farmers in 60 countries have adopted SRI.

“It has the potential to reduce the amount of water, money and labor that farmers in developing countries need to spend. Time and again, farmers have seen improvements in yield, profitability and resilience,” says Norman Uphoff, professor of international agriculture at Cornell.

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The idea of using less to gain more is seen as an important innovation for adapting farming to climate change and a way to increase yields at a time when human populations are growing fast but traditional plant breeding and genetically modified techniques have failed to increase yields more than a few percentage points, says Uphoff.

In Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, more than 335,000 hectares of rice are grown using SRI methods. Scientist Anil Kumar Verma from the rural nongovernmental organization Pran and the state government have led a push to develop new weeding tools to help farmers and yields have increased dramatically.

“SRI is changing the life of many farmers. Not only is it addressing food security problems, it is also emitting less carbon, which adds to global warming,” Verma says.  

The new way to grow rice is proving most popular in water-stressed countries, says Tavseef Mairaj Shah, a Ph.D. researcher at Germany’s Hamburg University of Technology. “Rice growing in Kashmir largely depends on irrigation systems that draw water from the river Jhelum. But climate change is leading to drier winters, untimely rains, and warmer summers.”

YAWAR NAZIR/GETTY IMAGES

Kashmiri farmers tie lumps of grass to make hay bales in a paddy field during harvesting season.

“SRI promises to be a viable alternative, not just from the water-savings perspective but because it offers better yields and soil conditions. Different studies, both at the experimental level and farmer-participative level, have shown that SRI improves yields with less water,” Shah adds.

Some academics, the global seed industry and the international community have rejected reports of “fantastic” yields, accusing farmers of falsifying records and researchers of carelessness and “non-science.” But more than 600 articles, collated by SRI International at Cornell University, have shown benefits.

“The last published [academic] critique of SRI was in 2006,” Uphoff says. “There is nothing more to prove. The original hostility has gone. It may have been linked to the fact that SRI came from the grassroots and not the well-resourced global agricultural industry, which for 50 years has invested heavily in genetics, mechanization, improved seeds and the use of inorganic fertilizers and pesticides.”

But, Uphoff says, the early opposition has resulted in comparatively little scientific research being conducted into SRI and a slow uptake by funders. “SRI was made controversial within the academic and donor communities. Donors have been reluctant to get involved although there are a variety of initiatives at the country or regional level,” he says.

Large donor agencies such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation say they prefer to invest in high-performance seeds and genetically modified technologies.

“[We fund] investments in rice breeding and genetics because we believe innovations in these areas have the greatest potential to empower smallholder farmers and lift their families out of poverty. We don’t currently invest in rice crop management research,” said Gina Ivey, head of global policy for agricultural development with the Gates Foundation.

Attitudes are changing, however. In 2017, SRI was endorsed by the science journal Nature and the United Nations, and the World Bank has begun to promote it in India and Egypt.

“Clearly SRI is one of the technology options that has the potential to increase paddy yields for small farmers. We have invested in scaling up SRI systems in rice in both Bihar and Tamil Nadu [states] and based on our experience have observed that there is potential of more than 25 percent increase in the yield [and a] 64 percent increase in output per unit of water for SRI,” says Vinay Kumar Vutukuru, a World Bank senior agricultural specialist.

Uphoff calls for governments to study the experiences of grassroots farmers: “The principles of SRI can be applied to many crops. It is a genie that can no longer be stuffed back into the lamp. We could have accomplished so much more for farmers, consumers and for the environment if we had even some very modest support [from international donors] and hadn’t had to rely on personal resources and a lot of volunteered effort.”

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HuffPost’s “This New World” series is funded by Partners for a New Economy and the Kendeda Fund. All content is editorially independent, with no influence or input from the foundations. If you have an idea or tip for the editorial series, send an email to thisnewworld@huffpost.com

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/farming-technique-using-drastically-less-water-is-catching-on_us_5af41876e4b0859d11d0ae35

Rice R& DNews:UC Davis Innovators Honored for Contributions in Agriculture, Pathology

UC Davis Innovators Honored for Contributions in Agriculture, Pathology

By Lisa Howard on May 15, 2018 in University News

2018 Innovator of the Year — DryCard™

The University of California, Davis, tonight (May 15) announced the recipients of the university’s 2018 Chancellor’s Innovation Awards at a ceremony on campus. Established in 2016, the awards recognize faculty, community partners and industry leaders for their work, dedication and success in improving the lives of others and addressing the needs of our global society either through innovations in technology or innovative societal engagement.

“These honorees reflect the growing importance of UC Davis as an incubator and promoter of innovation, not just in the Sacramento region, but in the world,” said Provost Ralph J. Hexter. “They are groundbreakers in finding new ways to feed the world, build community and develop technology that creates a better tomorrow for all.”

The university’s Venture Catalyst team manages the Chancellor’s Innovation Awards as part of its broader mission to enable innovative students, faculty and staff to engage effectively with the innovation community both within and outside the university. “Recognizing our campus innovators and celebrating how their research and innovative university activities positively impact society is one of the ways in which we are supporting a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship at UC Davis,” said Dushyant Pathak, associate vice chancellor of research and the executive director of Venture Catalyst within the UC Davis Office of Research.

Innovators of the Year

These awards recognize individual faculty, staff or teams whose innovative research or accomplishments have made a measurable societal impact in the preceding year, or whose university activities have achieved important milestones, and present very strong potential for societal impact. Recipients receive $10,000 that can be applied to their research or to university enabled societal engagement efforts. This year’s recipients are the DryCard team from the Horticulture Innovation Lab and Richard Levenson, professor and vice chair for strategic technologies in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.

DryCard team

The DryCard team from the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Horticulture in the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences was selected for its simple, low-cost invention that helps prevent food spoilage. The reusable DryCard™ is about the size of a business card and uses a strip of cobalt chloride paper that changes color based on humidity. Instructions (available in multiple languages) are printed directly on the card. With a DryCard and an airtight container, farmers can test samples of their crops for dryness in 20 to 30 minutes. Crops that are stored before being sufficiently dry are susceptible to molds and dangerous aflatoxins. Mold growth on dried foods is a pervasive problem in developing countries, leading to food waste and foods that are unsafe for consumption.

The DryCard team includes: Elizabeth Mitcham, director; James Thompson, postharvest specialist emeritus; Michael Reid, leader for innovation and technology; Angelos Deltsidis, international postharvest specialist; Archie Jarman, program officer; Anthony Phan, staff analyst; and Brenda Dawson, communications coordinator.

The idea for the card came from Reid and Thompson, who have a history of working together in California and around the world on postharvest technologies to reduce crop losses. Last year the card was named as the top emerging technology for reducing food loss and waste across the African continent at the All-Africa Postharvest Congress and Exhibition in Kenya. Through the Horticulture Innovation Lab, the team has collaborated with a network of independent businesses in Africa and Asia that have manufactured and distributed more than 10,000 DryCards. Helping local entrepreneurs manufacture the cards inexpensively but for profit is the team’s strategy for helping spread the product throughout the developing world.

The Horticulture Innovation Lab is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, as part of the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative called Feed the Future.

Richard Levenson

Levenson, professor and vice chair for strategic technologies in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the UC Davis School of Medicine, has been selected Innovator of the Year for the development of Microscopy with Ultraviolet Surface Excitation, or MUSE, to obtain high-resolution images of biological tissue specimens without first requiring the time-consuming preparation of thin sections mounted on glass slides.

Video: Richard Levenson on MUSE microscopy

The technology, based on intellectual property jointly developed at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and UC Davis, uses ultraviolet light to penetrate the surface of tissue samples to a depth of a few microns, about the same thickness of tissue slices on traditional microscope slides. The result is a detailed, diagnostic-quality image in minutes instead of the many hours that traditional methods require. MUSE has the potential to transform the practice of pathology, especially in low-resource settings, and to have a major global impact in health care by greatly reducing the cost and time to deliver definitive diagnostic results. The ability to obtain such nearly instant, high-resolution, full-color images can also be a valuable tool for researchers who want to get tissue-based insights at the laboratory bench. Levenson is the co-founder of MUSE Microscopy Inc., which is working to commercialize the technology.

Lifetime Achievement Award for Innovation

Plant geneticist Gurdev Khush has developed new strains of rice, enhancing global food production. 

​Gurdev Khush, a world-renowned plant geneticist, is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Innovation for his truly extraordinary leadership in developing rice strains that have enhanced the quality and quantity of global rice supplies. The award recognizes an acknowledged innovator whose career accomplishments include innovations that have led to a long-term positive impact on the lives of others and who is an inspiring influence for other innovators.

Khush is known one of the heroes of the Green Revolution, a movement that sought to significantly increase agricultural yields, particularly in developing countries.

Khush earned a B.Sc. from Punjab Agricultural University in India and a Ph.D. from UC Davis. He played a key role in the development of more than 300 innovative rice varieties. One of these, IR36, is the most widely planted food crop ever grown. He spent over 30 years at the International Rice Research Institute, or IRRI, directing and participating in both genetic research and the delivery of rice varieties to underserved populations around the globe.

Owing in large part to Khush’s contribution, world rice production increased from 257 million tons in 1966 to 718 million tons in 2011. Khush has won numerous international awards and has received honorary doctorates and degrees from multiple universities. After he retired from IRRI in 2002, Khush returned to UC Davis as an adjunct professor of plant sciences. Khush is also the recipient of the 2018 UC Davis Medal, given to those who have made exceptional and sustained contributions to the UC Davis community and beyond.

Innovative Community Partner Award

Seed Central is the recipient of the UC Davis Chancellor’s Innovative Community Partner of the Year Award, given in recognition of significant contributions to driving regional economic impact through innovation, entrepreneurship or support for growing the startup ecosystem in collaboration with university. 

Francois Korn (left) and Kent Bradford are co-founders of Seed Central. 

Seed Central energizes the seed and ag-biotech industry around UC Davis and contributes to economic development in the region. The public-private partnership was co-founded in 2010 by Francois Korn, managing director, and Kent Bradford, distinguished professor of plant sciences and director of the Seed Biotechnology Center at UC Davis. The innovative partnership facilitates communication and research collaboration between campus and industry in order to bring science to market faster. Seed Central connects campus scientists and students with industry researchers and managers at monthly networking events and encourages and helps industry sponsor research on campus. Seed Central also connects students with industry through frequent networking opportunities, field trips, shadowing experiences, internships, career development workshops and special events centered on outreach to women in STEM fields.

Media contact(s)

AJ Cheline, UC Davis Office of Research, 530-752-1101, acheline@ucdavis.eduhttps://www.ucdavis.edu/news/uc-davis-innovators-honored-contributions-agriculture-pathology

R&D News:CRI developed rice variations suitable for governments PFJ programme

CRI developed rice variations suitable for governments PFJ programme

By

 Ghana News Agency

 -

May 16, 2018

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rice

The government has been urged to adopt improved rice varieties developed by the Crops Research Institute (CRI) of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) for its signature “Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ)” programme.

Dr. Paul Kofi Dartey, a Research Scientist at the Institute, said these varieties were high-yielding, disease-resistant and of high nutritional value.

They were developed under Korea-Africa Food and Agriculture Cooperation Initiative (KAFACI).

Dr. Dartey, who is the Principal Investigator for the KAFACI, said it was important to encourage Ghanaians to plant and eat high quality rice, which had been developed locally.

Speaking to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) on the sidelines of a workshop at Fumesua in the Ejisu Municipality, he said, that was the way forward to achieve food security and boost farmers’ income.
It is estimated that the nation imports rice in excess of US$300 million annually.

The two-day workshop was organized by the KAFACI and was dubbed “Enhancement of national agricultural extension services (ENAES) phase two”.

On hand to participate were agricultural researchers and scientists from Ghana, Gabon, Ethiopia, Malawi, Senegal and Zimbabwe.

The goal was to discuss appropriate ways of disseminating quality rice varieties unto the market to reduce rice importation.

Dr. Dartey, earlier, presenting an overview of the project, said it had established three demonstration fields in three districts – Kadjebi, Biakoye and Hohoe.

Some small-holder farmer groups from Jasikan and Hohoe had requested to be supplied with the seed varieties after being introduced to the project.

He added that 23 farmers belonging to the “Dzidefo Farmers’ Group” had also tested three of the rice varieties – test-milled at the Food Research Institute.

Dr. Kim Jeong Jun, Executive-Secretary of the KAFACI, pledged the unwavering commitment of the South Korean government towards assisting Ghana to improve her agriculture through research and technology.
He said the project would expose farmers to improved rice varieties to increase yield and incomes.