November 27, 2017 Monday
Bedtime Story
Horvath moves to Rhodia Food
Their love for acidic environment has even
begotten these useful microbes the name Lactobacillus acidophilus.
You might ask an aside ask that such fully
cured sauerkraut might carry the risk of food poisoning as they are shelved for
months on ends in sealed containers.
That is a valid question but feel safe to
eat these delicacies as sauerkraut that has been properly cured is so acidic
that it becomes totally hostile for Clostridium botulinum to grow.
Horvath I guess was not too academically
inclined as mid way he left his Ph.D. and joined the food company Rhodia Food
that among the other things specialized in manufacturing bacterial starter
cultures.
Perhaps he was in need of financial help
which industries are far more capable of providing than university research
grants, which are not only limited but also capricious and erratic year to
year.
Rhodia Food needed Horvath because they
were having microbiological issues in their industry.
The problem they were having in the food
industry was this:
They were using another lactic acid
bacteria Streptococcus thermophilus that is a fermentative facultative anaerobe
and widely used by the dairy industry in the production of yogurt along with
lactobacillus.
I had always known Streptococcus to be evil
pathogens because it is one of the most taught pathogens in the medical schools,
specifically the two species S. pneumonia and S. pyogenes.
Hence I was astonished to learn that
according to the official statistics of 1998, 621 million kilograms of yogurt
and more than 1.02 billion kilograms of mozzarella cheese were produced from S.
thermophilus.
Rhodia Food was frequently encountering the
problem of phage infections in their cultures of S. thermophilus and hence they
had assigned Horvath the mission of overcoming these phage infections by DNA
engineering.
Hence Horvath started studying and
analyzing different strains of S. thermophilus.
His analysis showed that not all strains of
this microbe were equally vulnerable to the phage infections; in fact, some
showed a strong inherent resistance to these tiny viruses.
Analyzing the reason for this resistance
now suddenly became critical for the food industry as it was earlier for pure
researchers.
Horvath at this very time of moving in to
Rhodia Food happened to attend a scientific conference in Holland in 2002.
The conference was on lactic acid bacilli
(it amazed me to know that there could be international conferences solely for
this specific category of bacteria) where for the first time in his life he
came to know about CRISPR concept.
For two years after his return from that
conference, he genetically scrutinized his own strain of microbes for the
presence of CRISPRs.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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