Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Variety of Insect DNA discovered in World's Top Beverage Tea

Is this one of the secrets why tea tastes so good! What are the health benefits and harms?

Why is tea special? The researcher explains: "I drink coffee actually. . . . And I fear coffee probably is not well suited for it because coffee is roasted. And what DNA really doesn’t like is being heated up to a very high temperature for a long time"

From the abstract:
"Environmental DNA analysis (eDNA) has revolutionized the field of biomonitoring in the past years. Various sources have been shown to contain eDNA of diverse organisms, for example, water, soil, gut content and plant surfaces. Here we show that dried plant material is a highly promising source for arthropod community eDNA. ... Using this assay, we analysed various commercially produced teas and herbs. These samples recovered ecologically and taxonomically diverse arthropod communities, a total of over a thousand species in more than 20 orders, many of them specific to their host plant and its geographical origin. Atypically for eDNA, arthropod DNA in dried plants shows very high temporal stability, opening up plant archives as a source for historical arthropod eDNA. Considering these results, dried plant material appears excellently suited as a novel tool to monitor arthropods and arthropod–plant interactions, detect agricultural pests and identify the geographical origin of imported plant material. ..."

Spilling the Tea: Insect DNA Shows Up in World's Top Beverage | The Scientist Magazine® The Scientist speaks with Trier University’s Henrik Krehenwinkel, whose group recently detected traces of hundreds of arthropod species from a sample of dried plants—in this case, the contents of a tea bag.




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