Episode: 1513
Title: HPR1513: Stir-Fried Stochasticity: Bio-Boogers
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1513/hpr1513.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 04:32:13

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Today's episode of Hacker Public Radio is brought to you by Snot in your food on purpose.
Yoooo...
It's the middle of May 2014, and still, in accordance with the prophecy, Hacker Public
Radio needs shows again.
Hey, that means I can probably get away with pushing any old crap I may have recorded
on you listeners, and there's nothing you can do about it!
This episode isn't actually in a various plot to torment you all, but this does seem
like a good excuse for me to dust off an old concept I recorded a few episodes for half
a decade ago, and see how you like it.
Back around 2007-2008 or so, not long after I managed to finish my 20-year-long four-year
degree in microbiology, I found myself getting disgusted with news reporting on scientific
subjects.
They seemed to be all vague, sensationalist stories that were obviously just retouched
press releases from some university public relations department, and almost never actually
gave a reference to the actual study they were embellishing from, so you could see what
was really going on and why and how they did it.
As someone nerdy enough that I still occasionally read scientific papers for fun, this has always
annoyed the friggin' heck out of me.
It was actually news stories about a scientific study which the reporting flippantly described
as showing that babies understand dog language that prompted me to start recording.
And says my pseudonym on the internet might suggest it intersects with a casual interest
of mine.
A bit of trivia about me that you probably don't care about, but which I'll tell you anyway,
is that I tend to get along very well with dogs and at one point I considered studying
to become a veterinary behaviorist, and that's why my pseudonym is a dog philosophy pun.
I ended up recording about four episodes of varying quality over the next couple of
years, calling the concept stir-fried stochasticity.
The idea was that I'd hunt down an actual scientific publication rather than a press release,
and do a show describing exactly what the researchers were actually testing and the actual methods
they used, and what their own scientific report of their results said, described in a way
that would hopefully be comprehensible to at least anyone who paid attention in high school
and was reasonably literate, even if they weren't particularly scientifically inclined.
My preference was also to either hunt down the original paper for a currently hyped
science-so-called news story, or better still, to find completely ordinary papers with
useful information that nonetheless don't actually get reported because they're not full
of lasers and cancer and specs showing up on radio telescopes that totally could be a
planet full of space aliens you guys we so we swear.
The episode that I'm recycling for today is one of these latter useful ordinary science
papers, and was the second one that I recorded.
I don't think any of the recordings were ever heard by more than 4 or 5 people, though,
so today's hacker public radio is almost like a completely new show.
Please give it a listen, and if you haven't a chance, comment somewhere, and let me know
if this particular type of show would be of interest as a repeat feature.
Okay, ready?
Here we go then.
I have a thrill-packed mind-blowing laugh-a-minute paper for you today about Snot.
German-fected Snot, no less.
For food.
Well, okay, not really Snot.
These paper is WK Ding and NP Shaws, effect of various encapsulating materials on the
stability of probiotic bacteria, found in the March 2009, volume 74, number two edition
of the Journal of Food Science.
For those of us who went to public school, the title means the authors are testing different
types of Snot to see which kinds might help bacteria survive longer.
Specifically, they want to see how bacteria might be protected while being eaten and
sent through the harsh, bacteria-killing environment of your guts.
Probiotic bacteria are our friends.
The hypothesis is that by having a large population of friendly bacteria living in your
guts, it's a lot harder for unfriendly disease-causing bugs to move in.
I should clarify, this isn't the hypothesis that the authors are actually testing here,
just a description.
Probiotic bacteria help us digest food and some even make vitamins for us.
This is why marketers like to emphasize the live and active cultures aspect of many
brands of yogurt, which might help supplement your guts' population of friendly bacteria.
But there's a problem.
Your guts are not really very nice to bacteria.
Your stomach is full of hydrochloric acid and tends to kill off potentially friendly bacteria,
and then anything that manages to survive that has to deal with bile from your gallbladder,
which also tends to kill off probiotic bacteria.
Although a few bacterial cells are likely to survive, it takes more than a few to influence
the makeup of your intestines' resident microbes.
That's where the study comes in.
What I've been facetiously referring to as snot because of their slimy textures are
really just a selection of common thickening ingredients used in food, whose names you
might recognize if you've ever looked at the ingredients listed on your food's labels.
Specifically, the authors have taken Alginate, Guargum, Xanthangum, Locust-Beingum, and
Caraguinan.
They've mixed each with several different types of bacteria used in yogurt and similar
products, and then turned the bacteria loaded slime into tiny congealed beads.
Then they soaked each sample of these, which I can't resist calling biobuggers, in simulated
stomach acid and simulated bile for two hours each, while they watched to see how fast
the bacteria and the little biobuggers were killed off in the process.
These gums, incidentally, are all polysaccharides, meaning they're made of long chains of sugar
molecules, just like the familiar corn snot and fruit snot, I mean cornstarch and pectin.
The following are the details of this study.
For those of you who don't care about the details, you can skip ahead to about the 10-minute
22nd mark, where I'll give an executive summary.
The authors grew cultures of several strains of the generic lactobacillus and bifidobacterium,
lactobacillus remnosus, salverius, plantarum, acidophilus, and paracaceae, and bifidobacterium
longum and lactus.
They were cultured in MRS broth, then concentrated down to about 10 million colony forming units
per milliliter.
They say colony forming units, instead of a simple word like cells, because they only
want to count specifically the cells that are still healthy enough to grow up into normal
colonies when they're put into a culture plate later.
MRS stands for Demand, Rogosa, and Sharp.
The names of the authors who first published the recipe for this culture medium, which
is specifically tuned for growing lactobacillus species.
If you're a real microbiology nerd, next time you have to mention growing lactocacid
bacteria in a report, you'll remember to cite the publication.
It is Demand, JD, Rogosa, M, and Sharp, ME, quote, a medium for the cultivation of lactobacill
lie, unquote, 1960, Journal of Applied Bacteriology, Volume 23, Pages 130-135.
Each of these cultures was then mixed into 3% solutions of each kind of snot, I mean
3 grams of dried alginate, guar gum, locust bean gum, xanthan gum, and caroginin powders,
each mixed into 100 milliliters of water.
Then they mixed each of those into 600 milliliters of vegetable oil, with a milliliter
of polysorbate 80 to help it mix.
They shoved the whole mess through a kind of super-science high-pressure nanotechnology
playdough fun factory device called a microfluidizer, which squeezes the mixture through tiny
little holes at high pressure to mix them up.
The idea here is that the watery bacteria-loaded gums won't mix well with the oil, and you end
up with them formed into tiny little droplets, like the ones you see when you shake up oil
and vinegar dressing, only much smaller and hopefully all pretty close to the same size.
Once that was done, they added calcium chloride and stuck the samples in the fridge to solidify.
The calcium ions apparently get in between the long stringy polysaccharide molecules
that the gums are made of, and help the strands stick together, which makes the little
beads harden up into little bio-buggers.
While they were at it, they also kept unincasulated cultures to use as controls for their experiments,
so that they could tell how their experiment compared to unprotected bacteria.
As a bonus, they also made up a batch of this stuff with a fluorescent dye instead of
a bacteria, a dye called 6-carboxyfloresin.
That way they could do a separate test to see how slowly small molecules like the dye
would leak out of the gum.
Okay, still with me?
Congratulations, you've survived the complicated part.
The rest is just testing.
The simulated stomach acid was MRS broth brought down to a pH of 2 with extra hydrochloric
acid.
The simulated bile was a substance called tarocholic acid mixed in with MRS media.
Tarocholic acid is a main component of bile.
To mix that in at a rate of 3 grams per 100 milliliters, samples of each encapsulated
culture and unincasulated control culture were added to each of these, and then tested
every 30 minutes for 2 hours to see how many bacteria were still alive.
The bonus test with the fluorescent dye was just a matter of dumping samples of the dyed
biobogermaterial in water for 2 weeks and then checking to see how much of it had leaked
out.
Finally, as tradition demands, they took their results home in the form of a bunch of
numbers to make pretty graphs and charts on their computers with.
The authors give detailed tables and graphs showing their results, which you can find
in their paper if you're interested.
In summary, the seaweed snots, alginate and cariguinin, and the bacteria snot, xanthan gum,
all showed substantial ability to protect the bacteria from stomach acid and bile.
Most of the bacteria in these materials were still alive at levels of around 10 to the
7th, that's 10 million, colony forming units per milliliter after 1 hour, which the
authors cite from a 1998 paper as the concentration necessary to be useful as a probiotic supplement.
The bean snot, squar gum, and locust bean gum didn't do so well, though they still did
better than the unprotected bacteria.
Alginate, xanthan gum, and cariguinin also leaked a lot less dye in the 2 week dye leakage
test.
Now, for those of you too busy berating your chauffeur for distracting you while driving
you around the city in your gold-plated Hummer H3 limo, here's the short version.
The researchers here have taken several kinds of common food-tickening ingredients and mixed
them with healthy food bacteria to make itty bitty little capsules of live cells, in the
hope that the thickening ingredients might keep healthy yogurt bacteria alive in the harsh
environment of people's guts, long enough for the bacteria to be beneficial to the eater.
They found that alginate, xanthan gum, and cariguinin all worked pretty well for this, but
that squar gum and locust bean gum weren't really that helpful.
They also demonstrated that other water soluble sorts of substances also tend to leak out
more slowly in the same three thickeners that protected the bacteria best.
Some of you might be thinking what most of the population thinks when they hear what's
an scientific publication?
So what?
Who cares?
Well, I'll tell you who.
First, anyone who eats food and has a digestive system.
This study's results appear to be useful practical information for development of healthier
foods to add my own speculation to what the authors actually discuss.
It looks as though this technique could also be used to more effectively carry other nutritious
substances or perhaps medicines into your digestive system.
I'm definitely not a medical scientist, but I still might suggest that this encapsulation
technique might be turned into a comparatively pleasant alternative for the very effective
but somewhat disgusting medical treatment known as fecal transplant.
Having spent enough time by now talking about snot and boogers already, I'll spare you
the details, other than to say that yes it is a real and legitimate treatment, particularly
for certain bacterial infections of the digestive tract, and it really is more or less what
the name suggests.
You can find the details online if you really want them.
Another population who might care about this research is made up of molecular gastronomes.
For those of us who went to public school, that's a fancy way to say food nerds.
The encapsulation technique describes sounds like something that I could feasibly use myself.
I may not have access to a grotesquely expensive device like a microfluidizer, but I can certainly
get my hands on a French press on the blender.
For purposes of home food experimentation, I suspect that it'd be good enough, and in
any case, I would hypothesize that the larger bio-buggers resulting from the simpler equipment
might resist stomach acid longer anyway.
He'll billy biotech.
In my kitchen, it's more likely than you think.
And there you have it, in all its wet, floppy glory.
You can tell me how bad this episode sucked, either at hackerpublicradio.org, or on the
blog I've got dedicated to my HBR contributions at hpr.dogphilosophy.net, where you'll also
find a page with an updated list of topics that I'm thinking about doing one of these
days, so you can tell me which one's not to do because they're stupid.
Seriously though, while you're at it, think about topics that you know about that someone
else might want to know about, and consider recording a hackerpublic radio show about
it as well.
HPR needs and wants more contributors, so please join in.
If I can do it, I'm pretty sure you can too.
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When you're kissing with your honey, and your nose gets sort of runny, you may think
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