Tag Archives: fish

New Wave and its non-shrimp shrimp

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I received a news release from a start-up company, New Wave Foods, which specializes in creating plant-based seafood. The concept looks very interesting and sci fi (Lois McMaster Bujold, and I’m sure others, has featured vat-grown meat and fish in her novels). Apparently, Google has already started using some of the New Wave product in its employee cafeteria. Here’s more from the July 19, 2016 New Wave Foods news release,

New Wave Foods announced today that it has successfully opened a seed round aimed at developing seafood that is healthier for humans and the planet. Efficient Capacity kicked off the round and New Crop Capital provided additional funding.

New Wave Foods uses plant-based ingredients, such as red algae, to engineer new edible materials that replicate the taste and texture of fish and shellfish while improving their nutritional profiles. Its first product, which has already been served in Google’s cafeterias, will be a truly sustainable shrimp. Shrimp is the nation’s most popular seafood, currently representing more than a quarter of the four billion pounds of fish and shellfish consumed by Americans annually. For each pound of shrimp caught, up to 15 pounds of other animals, including endangered dolphins, turtles, and sharks, die.

The market for meat analogs is expected to surpass $5 billion by 2020, and savvy investors are increasingly taking notice. In recent years, millions in venture capital has flowed into plant-based alternatives to animal foods from large food processors and investors like Bill Gates and Li Ka-shing, Asia’s richest businessman.

“The astounding scale of our consumption of sea animals is decimating ocean ecosystems through overfishing, massive death through bycatch, water pollution, carbon emissions, derelict fishing gear, mangrove deforestation, and more,” said New Wave Foods co-founder and CEO Dominique Barnes. “Shrimping is also fraught with human rights abuses and slave labor, so we’re pleased to introduce a product that is better for people, the planet, and animals.”

Efficient Capacity is an investment fund that advises and invests in companies worldwide. Efficient Capacity partners have founded or co-founded more than ten companies and served as advisors or directors to dozens of others.

New Crop Capital is a specialized private venture capital fund that provides early-stage investments to companies that develop “clean,” (i.e., cultured) and plant-based meat, dairy, and egg products or facilitate the promotion and sale of such products.

The current round of investments follows investments from SOS Ventures via IndieBio, an accelerator group funding and building biotech startups. IndieBio companies use technology to solve our culture’s most challenging problems, such as feeding a growing population sustainably. Along with investment, IndieBio offers its startups resources such as lab space and mentorship to help take an idea to a product.

Along with its funding round, New Wave Foods announced the appointment of John Wiest as COO. Wiest brings more than 15 years of senior management experience in food and consumer products, including animal-based seafood companies, to the company. As an executive and consultant, Wiest has helped dozens of food ventures develop new products, expand distribution channels, and create strategic partnerships.

New Wave Foods, founded in 2015, is a leader in plant-based seafood that is healthier and better for the environment. New Wave products are high in clean nutrients and deliver a culinary experience consumers expect without the devastating environmental impact of commercial fishing. Co-founder and CEO Dominique Barnes holds a master’s in marine biodiversity and conservation from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and co-founder and CTO Michelle Wolf holds a bachelor’s in materials science and engineering and a master’s in biomedical engineering. New Wave Foods’ first products will reach consumers as early as Q4 2016.

I found a February 5, 2016 review article about the plant-based shrimp written by Ariel Schwartz for Tech Insider (Note: A link has been removed),

… after trying a lab-made “shrimp” made of plant proteins and algae, I’d consider giving it up the real thing. Maybe others will too.

The shrimp I ate came from New Wave Foods, a startup that just graduated from biotech startup accelerator IndieBio. When I first met New Wave’s founders in the fall of 2015, they had been working for eight weeks at IndieBio’s San Francisco lab. …

…

Barnes and Wolf [marine conservationist Dominique Barnes and materials scientist Michelle Wolf ] ultimately figured out a way to use plant proteins, along with the same algae that shrimp eat — the stuff that helps give the crustaceans their color and flavor — to come up with a substitute that has a similar texture, taste, color, and nutritional value.

The fact that New Wave’s product has the same high protein, low fat content as real shrimp is a big source of differentiation from other shrimp substitutes, according to Barnes.

In early February, I finally tried a breaded version of New Wave’s shrimp. Here’s what it looked like:

New Wave Foods Ariel Schwartz/Tech Insider

It was a little hard to judge the taste because of the breading, but the texture was almost perfect. The lab-made shrimp had that springiness and mixture of crunch and chew that you’d expect from the real thing. I could see myself replacing real shrimp with this in some situations.

Whether it could replace shrimp all the time depends on how the product tastes without the breading. “Our ultimate goal is to get to the cocktail shrimp level,” says Barnes.

I’m glad to have stumbled across Ariel Schwartz again as I’ve always enjoyed her writing and it has been a few years.

For the curious, you can check out more of Ariel Schwartz’s work here and find out more about Efficient Capacity in a listing on CrunchBase, New Crop Capital here, SOS Ventures here, IndieBio here. and, of course,  New Wave Foods here.

One final comment, I am not endorsing this company or its products. This is presented as interesting information and, hopefully, I will be hearing more about the company and its products in the future.

University of British Columbia gets $3.5M in funding for nanoscience and other sciences

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One-third to one-half of the researchers getting grants are working on nanotechnology projects. From a March 1, 2016 University of British Columbia (UBC) news release (received via email),

Research into forest renewal, quantum computer nanotechnology, solar power, high-tech manufacturing, forestry products and the Subarctic ocean climate gained a boost today, with the announcement of $3.5 million in funding for six UBC projects from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

The funding comes from NSERC’s Strategic Partnership Grants, which support scientific partnerships to strengthen the Canadian economy, society and environment.

…

Konrad Walus, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

A framework for embedding, simulation and design of computational nanotechnology using a quantum annealing processor [emphasis mine] — $394,500

This project will work with Quantum Silicon Inc. [emphasis mine] to conduct experiments that provide better insight into the potential of quantum computing, and will develop design rules for future designers of the technology.

Alireza Nojeh, Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Thermionic solar energy converter — $510,500

In close collaboration with four Canadian industrial partners, this project will establish a novel approach to solar electricity generation using recent discoveries in nanostructured materials.

With mention of quantum annealing, I would have expected their industrial partner to be D-Wave Systems, a Vancouver-based company which has gotten a lot of attention for its quantum annealing processor (a Dec. 16, 2015 post titled: Google announces research results after testing 1,097-qubit D-Wave 2X™ quantum computers is one of my most recent pieces about the company). The company mentioned, Quantum Silicon, is based in Alberta.

There is one project where I believe at least some of the work is being done at the nanoscale or less (from the March 1, 2016 news release0,

Harry Brumer, Professor, Michael Smith Laboratories at UBC

Biorefining of novel cellulosics from forest fibre resources — $532,812

Working with a Canadian forest products company, this project will use genomic and biochemical methods to develop new technology for wood-fibre modification.

And for the curious, here are the other projects (from the March 1, 2016 news release),

Suzanne Simard, Professor, Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences

Designing successful forest renewal practices for our changing climate — $929,000

This project will investigate novel forest renewal methods, and establish recommendations for best harvesting and regeneration practices under changing climate conditions.

…

Chadwick Sinclair, Professor, Faculty of Applied Science – Materials Engineering

Through-process modeling for optimized electron beam additive manufacturing — $484,400

Working in collaboration with Canadian electron-beam processor PAVAC Industries Inc. [emphasis mine], this project will develop a through-process model for additive manufacturing that will link machine control to material microstructure and properties.

Philippe Tortell, Professor, Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences

Quantifying climate-dependent and anthropogenic impacts on ecosystem services in the Subarctic Pacific Ocean; State-of-the-art observational tools to inform policy and management — $707,100

University scientists and Fisheries and Oceans Canada will use field-based observations to generate satellite-based models of ecosystem productivity to examine fish yields and environmental variability.

PAVAC Industries is headquartered in Richmond, BC, Canada,.

Congratulations to the researchers!

Omnidirectional fish camouflage and polarizing light

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I find this camouflage technique quite interesting due to some nice writing, from a Nov. 19, 2015 Florida Atlantic University (FAU) news release on EurekAlert,

The vast open ocean presents an especially challenging environment for its inhabitants since there is nowhere for them to hide. Yet, nature has found a remarkable way for fish to hide from their predators using camouflage techniques. In a study published in the current issue of Science, researchers from Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University and collaborators show that fish scales have evolved to not only reflect light, but to also scramble polarization. They identified the tissue structure that fish evolved to do this, which could be an analog to develop new materials to help hide objects in the water.

HBOI researchers and colleagues collected more than 1,500 video-polarimetry measurements from live fish from distinct habitats under a variety of viewing conditions, and have revealed for the first time that fish have an ‘omnidirectional’ solution they use to camouflage themselves, demonstrating a new form of camouflage in nature — light polarization matching.

“We’ve known that open water fish have silvery scales for skin that reflect light from above so the reflected intensity is comparable to the background intensity when looking up, obliquely at the fish, as a predator would,” said Michael Twardowski, Ph.D., research professor at FAU’s HBOI and co-author of the study who collaborated with co-author James M. Sullivan, Ph.D., also a research professor at FAU’s HBOI. “This is one form of camouflage in the ocean.”

Typical light coloring on the ventral side (belly) and dark coloring on the dorsal (top) side of the fish also can help match intensity by differential absorption of light, in addition to reflection matching.

Light-scattering processes in the open ocean create spatially heterogeneous backgrounds. Polarization (the directional vibration of light waves) generates changes in the light environment that vary with the Sun’s position in the sky.

Polarization is a fundamental property of light, like color, but human eyes do not have the ability to sense it. Light travels in waves, and for natural sunlight, the direction of these waves is random around a central viewing axis. But when light reflects off a surface, waves parallel to that surface are dominant in the reflected beam. Many visual systems for fish have the ability to discriminate polarization, like built-in polarized sunglasses.

“Polarized sunglasses help you see better by blocking horizontal waves to reduce bright reflections,” said Twardowski. “The same principle helps fish discriminate objects better in water.”

Twardowski believes that even though light reflecting off silvery scales does a good job matching intensity of the background, if the scales acted as simple mirrors they would impart a polarization signature to the reflected light very different from the more random polarization of the background light field.

“This signature would be easily apparent to a predator with ability to discriminate polarization, resulting in poor camouflage,” he said. “Fish have evolved a solution to this potential vulnerability.”

To empirically determine whether open-ocean fish have evolved a cryptic reflectance strategy for their heterogeneous polarized environments, the researchers measured the contrasts of live open-ocean and coastal fish against the pelagic background in the Florida Keys and Curaçao. They used a single 360 degree camera around the horizontal plane of the targets and used both light microscopy and full-body video-polarimetry.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), publisher of Science magazine where the researchers’ study can be found issued a Nov. 19, 2015 news release on EurekAlert further describing the work,

… The study’s insights could pave the way to improvements in materials like polarization-sensitive satellites. Underwater, light vibrates in way that “polarizes” it. While humans cannot detect this vibrational state of light without technology, it is becoming increasingly evident that many species of fish can; lab-based studies hint that some fish have even adapted ways to use polarization to their advantage, including developing platelets within their skin that reflect and manipulate polarized light so the fish are camouflaged. To gain more insights into this form of camouflage, Parrish Brady and colleagues measured the polarization abilities of live fish as they swam in the open ocean. Using a specialized underwater camera (…), the researchers took numerous polarization measurements of several open water and coastal species of fish throughout the day as the sun changed position in the sky, causing subsequent changes in the polarization of light underwater. They found that open water fish from the Carangidae fish family, such as lookdowns and bigeye scad, exhibited significantly lower polarization contrast with their backgrounds (making them harder to spot) than carangid species that normally inhabit reefs. Furthermore, the researchers found that this reflective camouflage was optimal at angles from which predators most often spot fish, such as from directly below the fish and at angles perpendicular to their length. By looking at the platelets of open water fish under the microscope, the team found that the platelets align well on vertical axes, allowing fish to reflect the predictable downward direction of light in the open ocean. Yet the platelets are angled in way that diffuses light along the horizontal axis, the researchers say. They suggest that these different axes work together to reflect a wide range of depolarized light, offering better camouflage abilities to their hosts.

The AAAS has made available a video combining recordings from the researchers and animation to illustrate the research,

Be sure you can hear the audio as this won’t make much sense otherwise.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Open-ocean fish reveal an omnidirectional solution to camouflage in polarized environments by Parrish C. Brady, Alexander A. Gilerson, George W. Kattawar, James M. Sullivan, Michael S. Twardowski, Heidi M. Dierssen, Meng Gao, Kort Travis, Robert Ian Etheredge, Alberto Tonizzo, Amir Ibrahim, Carlos Carrizo, Yalong Gu, Brandon J. Russell, Kathryn Mislinski, Shulei Zha1, Molly E. Cummings. Science 20 November 2015: Vol. 350 no. 6263 pp. 965-969 DOI: 10.1126/science.aad5284

This paper is behind a paywall.

Smaller (20nm vs 110nm) silver nanoparticles are more likely to absorbed by fish

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An Oct. 8, 2015 news item on Nanowerk offers some context for why researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) are studying silver nanoparticles and their entry into the water system,

More than 2,000 consumer products today contain nanoparticles — particles so small that they are measured in billionths of a meter.

Manufacturers use nanoparticles to help sunscreen work better against the sun’s rays and to make athletic apparel better at wicking moisture away from the body, among many other purposes.

Of those products, 462 — ranging from toothpaste to yoga mats — contain nanoparticles made from silver, which are used for their ability to kill bacteria. But that benefit might be coming at a cost to the environment. In many cases, simply using the products as intended causes silver nanoparticles to wind up in rivers and other bodies of water, where they can be ingested by fish and interact with other marine life.

For scientists, a key question has been to what extent organisms retain those particles and what effects they might have.

I’d like to know where they got those numbers “… 2,000 consumer products …” and “… 462 — ranging from toothpaste to yoga mats — contain nanoparticles made from silver… .”

Getting back to the research, an Oct. 7, 2015 UCLA news release, which originated the news item, describes the work in more detail,

A new study by the University of California Center for Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology has found that smaller silver nanoparticles were more likely to enter fish’s bodies, and that they persisted longer than larger silver nanoparticles or fluid silver nitrate. The study, published online in the journal ACS Nano, was led by UCLA postdoctoral scholars Olivia Osborne and Sijie Lin, and Andre Nel, director of UCLA’s Center for Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology and associate director of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.

Nel said that although it is not yet known whether silver nanoparticles are harmful, the research team wanted to first identify whether they were even being absorbed by fish. CEIN, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, is focused on studying the effects of nanotechnology on the environment.

In the study, researchers placed zebrafish in water that contained fluid silver nitrate and two sizes of silver nanoparticles — some measuring 20 nanometers in diameter and others 110 nanometers. Although the difference in size between these two particles is so minute that it can only be seen using high-powered transmission electron microscopes, the researchers found that the two sizes of particles affected the fish very differently.

The researchers used zebrafish in the study because they have some genetic similarities to humans, their embryos and larvae are transparent (which makes them easier to observe). In addition, they tend to absorb chemicals and other substances from water.

Osborne said the team focused its research on the fish’s gills and intestines because they are the organs most susceptible to silver exposure.

“The gills showed a significantly higher silver content for the 20-nanometer than the 110-nanometer particles, while the values were more similar in the intestines,” she said, adding that both sizes of the silver particles were retained in the intestines even after the fish spent seven days in clean water. “The most interesting revelation was that the difference in size of only 90 nanometers made such a striking difference in the particles’ demeanor in the gills and intestines.”

The experiment was one of the most comprehensive in vivo studies to date on silver nanoparticles, as well as the first to compare silver nanoparticle toxicity by extent of organ penetration and duration with different-sized particles, and the first to demonstrate a mechanism for the differences.

Osborne said the results seem to indicate that smaller particles penetrated deeper into the fishes’ organs and stayed there longer because they dissolve faster than the larger particles and are more readily absorbed by the fish.

Lin said the results indicate that companies using silver nanoparticles have to strike a balance that recognizes their benefits and their potential as a pollutant. Using slightly larger nanoparticles might help make them somewhat safer, for example, but it also might make the products in which they’re used less effective.

He added that data from the study could be translated to understand how other nanoparticles could be used in more environmentally sustainable ways.

Nel said the team’s next step is to determine whether silver particles are potentially harmful. “Our research will continue in earnest to determine what the long-term effects of this exposure can be,” he said.

Here’s an image illustrating the findings,

Courtesy ACS Nano

Courtesy ACS Nano

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Organ-Specific and Size-Dependent Ag Nanoparticle Toxicity in Gills and Intestines of Adult Zebrafish by Olivia J. Osborne, Sijie Lin, Chong Hyun Chang, Zhaoxia Ji, Xuechen Yu, Xiang Wang, Shuo Lin, Tian Xia, and André E. Nel. ACS Nano, Article ASAP DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.5b04583 Publication Date (Web): September 1, 2015

Copyright © 2015 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.

Brain injuries in fish and nanoparticles?

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I would have liked more details about the fish and how nanoparticles cause brain injuries. Here’s an excerpt from the Sept.19, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,

Scientists at the University of Plymouth have shown, for the first time in an animal, that nanoparticles have a detrimental effect on the brain and other parts of the central nervous system.

They subjected rainbow trout to titanium oxide [or titanium dioxide as it’s sometimes called] nanoparticles which are widely used as a whitening agent in many products including paints, some personal care products, and with applications being considered for the food industry. They found that the particles caused vacuoles (holes) to form in parts of the brain and for nerve cells in the brain to die. Although some effects of nanoparticles have been shown previously in cell cultures and other in vitro systems this is the first time it has been confirmed in a live vertebrate.

I have a number of questions after reading this (and the rest of the news item).

  • The statement is that nanoparticles cause brain injury in fish but the researchers mention titanium di/oxide nanoparticles only.  Did they test other nanoparticles as well?
  • How did they conduct the tests?
  • Did the fish ingest titanium di/oxide from the water? From their food? From both?
  • What concentrations were they exposed to?
  • Were they in an environment similar to what they’d experience naturally? Or were they in special tanks?

Apparently the results are being presented in London at the “6th International meeting on the Environmental Effects on Nanoparticles and Nanomaterials” (21st – 23rd September [2011]) at the Royal Society.

Using an incendiary headline (Nanoparticles cause brain injury in fish) for your news release is certainly an attention getter. I trust the research team (led by Professor Richard Handy of the Plymouth University Ecotoxicology Research and Innovation Centre’s Environmenal nanoscience and nanotoxicology team) can back up this statement with data and that it will be made available to a broader audience than the meeting attendees.

Bee silk; minnows and silver nanoparticles; David Cramb at U of Calgary finds way to measure nanoparticles in bloodstream; Rock Against Prisons

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I had not realized that there’s an international drive to produce artificial insect silk until this morning. According to a news item on Nanowerk,

CSIRO [Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation] scientist Dr Tara Sutherland and her team have achieved another important milestone in the international quest to artificially produce insect silk. They have hand-drawn fine threads of honeybee silk from a ‘soup’ of silk proteins that they had produced transgenically.

These threads were as strong as threads drawn from the honeybee silk gland, a significant step towards development of coiled coil silk biomaterials.

“It means that we can now seriously consider the uses to which these biomimetic materials can be put,” Dr Sutherland said.

“We used recombinant cells of bacterium E. coli to produce the silk proteins which, under the right conditions, self-assembled into similar structures to those in honeybee silk.

If I understand this rightly,  ‘tinkering’ with bacterium E. coli makes this a transgenic system and I believe it’s a GEO (genetically engineered organism) and not a GMO (genetically modified organism). In any event, it’s also biomimetic because this process mimics a biological system.

On the practical side of things, insect silk could potentially be used for tough, lightweight textiles and medical applications such as sutures. You can read more about this in the Nanowerk news item.

A Purdue University study has added more evidence that silver nanoparticles are toxic to fish. According to the news item on physorg.com,

Tested on fathead minnows ╨ an organism often used to test the effects of toxicity on aquatic life — nanosilver suspended in solution proved toxic and even lethal to the minnows. When the nanosilver was allowed to settle, the solution became several times less toxic but still caused malformations in the minnows.

“Silver nitrate is a lot more toxic than nanosilver, but when nanosilver was sonicated, or suspended, its toxicity increased tenfold,” said Maria Sepulveda, an assistant professor of forestry and natural resources whose findings were published in the journal Ecotoxicology. “There is reason to be concerned.”

Coincidentally, Dr. David Cramb, director of the Nanoscience Program and professor in the department of Chemistry at the University of Calgary, and his colleagues have published a paper about a new methodology they are developing to measure the impact of nanoparticles (no specifics about which ones) on human health and the environment. From the news release on Eureka Alert, [Mar.4.10 ETA since I think the Eureka doesn’t last long, here’s a link to the same news on Azonano]

Cramb, director of the Faculty of Science’s nanoscience program, and his researchers have developed a methodology to measure various aspects of nanoparticles in the blood stream of chicken embryos. Their discovery is published in the March online edition of Chemical Physics Letters.

“With the boom in nanomaterials production there is an increasing possibility of environmental and/or human exposure. Thus there is a need to investigate their potential detrimental effects,” says Cramb. “We have developed very specialized tools to begin measuring such impacts.”

To close today off, I got a news release from poet Heather Haley (Vancouver, Canada based) about her latest local appearance,

Heather Haley was a member of Vancouver punk bands, the all-girl Zellots and the .45s with Randy Rampage and Brad Kent. Long-lost video of the Zellots will be screened and Heather will interviewed for a live webcast. She will perform poetry from her new collection, “Three Blocks West of Wonderland.” Hope to *see* you there.

ROCK AGAINST PRISONS Live Video Retrospective         Tuesday, March 9, 2010         7:00pm – 11:55pm
Little Mountain Gallery         195 east 26th Ave         Vancouver, BC
On March 9th, the social forces will be mounting an assault on the staid and the bland. From a Punk Rock Swap Meet to a Celebrity Auction, from an ‘umplugged’ stage to a Grand Slam Poetry Karaoke by some of the big stars of 1979, we are getting the Old Gang Together. We review the fabulous footage by doreen grey from the seminal 1979 gig and plan out the 2010 resurgence of the Vancouver Explosion.
Come on out and celebrate Vancouver’s living heritage with those who made it happen: Rabid, Female Hands, Devices, Zellots, Tunnel Canary, AKA, Subhumans. Special appearances. Door Prizes. Live Webcast and Kissing Booth. Fishnet stockings. Oodles of prime swag and fixins. Your every 1979 Punk nightmare come beautifully true.

You can also check out Heather’s latest work on her website.