Sugar
Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. The various types of sugar are derived from different sources. Simple sugars are called monosaccharides and include glucose and galactose. "Table sugar" or "granulated sugar" refers to a disaccharide of glucose and fructose. In the body, sucrose is hydrolysed into glucose. Sugars are found in the tissues of most plants, but sucrose is concentrated in sugarcane and sugar beet, making them ideal for efficient commercial extraction to make refined sugar. Sugarcane originated in tropical Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, is known of from before 6,000 BP, sugar beet was first described in writing by Olivier de Serres and originated in southwestern and Southeast Europe along the Atlantic coasts and the Mediterranean Sea, in North Africa, Macaronesia, to Western Asia. In 2016, the combined world production of those two crops was about two billion tonnes. Other disaccharides include lactose. Longer chains of sugar molecules are called polysaccharides.
Some other chemical substances, such as glycerol and sugar alcohols, may have a sweet taste, but are not classified as sugar. Sucrose is used in prepared foods, is sometimes added to commercially available beverages, may be used by people as a sweetener for foods and beverages; the average person consumes about 24 kilograms of sugar each year, or 33.1 kilograms in developed countries, equivalent to over 260 food calories per day. As sugar consumption grew in the latter part of the 20th century, researchers began to examine whether a diet high in sugar refined sugar, was damaging to human health. Excessive consumption of sugar has been implicated in the onset of obesity, cardiovascular disease and tooth decay. Numerous studies have tried to clarify those implications, but with varying results because of the difficulty of finding populations for use as controls that consume little or no sugar. In 2015, the World Health Organization recommended that adults and children reduce their intake of free sugars to less than 10%, encouraged a reduction to below 5%, of their total energy intake.
The etymology reflects the spread of the commodity. From Sanskrit शर्करा, meaning "ground or candied sugar," "grit, gravel", came Persian shakar, whence Arabic سكر, whence Medieval Latin succarum, whence 12th-century French sucre, whence the English word sugar. Italian zucchero, Spanish azúcar, Portuguese açúcar came directly from Arabic, the Spanish and Portuguese words retaining the Arabic definite article; the earliest Greek word attested is σάκχαρις. The English word jaggery, a coarse brown sugar made from date palm sap or sugarcane juice, has a similar etymological origin: Portuguese jágara from the Malayalam ചക്കരാ, itself from the Sanskrit शर्करा. Sugar has been produced in the Indian subcontinent since ancient times and its cultivation spread from there into modern-day Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass, it was not plentiful or cheap in early times, in most parts of the world, honey was more used for sweetening. People chewed raw sugarcane to extract its sweetness. Sugarcane was a native of Southeast Asia.
Different species seem to have originated from different locations with Saccharum barberi originating in India and S. edule and S. officinarum coming from New Guinea. One of the earliest historical references to sugarcane is in Chinese manuscripts dating to 8th century BCE, which state that the use of sugarcane originated in India. In the tradition of Indian medicine, the sugarcane is known by the name Ikṣu and the sugarcane juice is known as Phāṇita, its varieties and characterics are defined in nighaṇṭus such as the Bhāvaprakāśa. Sugar remained unimportant until the Indians discovered methods of turning sugarcane juice into granulated crystals that were easier to store and to transport. Crystallized sugar was discovered by the time of the Imperial Guptas, around the 5th century CE. In the local Indian language, these crystals were called khanda, the source of the word candy. Indian sailors, who carried clarified butter and sugar as supplies, introduced knowledge of sugar along the various trade routes they travelled.
Traveling Buddhist monks took sugar crystallization methods to China. During the reign of Harsha in North India, Indian envoys in Tang China taught methods of cultivating sugarcane after Emperor Taizong of Tang made known his interest in sugar. China established its first sugarcane plantations in the seventh century. Chinese documents confirm at least two missions to India, initiated in 647 CE, to obtain technology for sugar refining. In the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and China, sugar became a staple of cooking and desserts. Nearchus, admiral of Alexander of Macedonia, knew of sugar during the year 325 B. C. because of his participation in the campaign of India led by Alexander. The Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides in the 1st century CE described sugar in his medical treatise De Materia Medica, Pliny the Elder, a 1st-century CE Roman, described sugar in his Natural History: "Sugar is made in Arabia as well, but Indian sugar is better, it is a kind of honey found in cane, white as gum, it crunches between the teeth.
It comes in lumps the size of a hazelnut. Sugar is used only for medical purposes." Crusaders brought sugar back to Europe after their campaigns in the Hol
Fat
Fat is one of the three main macronutrients, along with carbohydrate and protein. Fats molecules consist of carbon and hydrogen atoms, thus they are all hydrocarbon molecules. Examples include cholesterol and triglycerides; the terms "lipid", "oil" and "fat" are confused. "Lipid" is the general term, though a lipid is not a triglyceride. "Oil" refers to a lipid with short or unsaturated fatty acid chains, liquid at room temperature, while "fat" refers to lipids that are solids at room temperature – however, "fat" may be used in food science as a synonym for lipid. Fats, like other lipids, are hydrophobic, are soluble in organic solvents and insoluble in water. Fat is an important foodstuff for many forms of life, fats serve both structural and metabolic functions, they are a necessary part of the diet of most heterotrophs and are the most energy dense, thus the most efficient form of energy storage. Some fatty acids that are set free by the digestion of fats are called essential because they cannot be synthesized in the body from simpler constituents.
There are two essential fatty acids in human nutrition: linoleic acid. Other lipids needed by the body can be synthesized from other fats. Fats and other lipids are broken down in the body by enzymes called lipases produced in the pancreas. Fats and oils are categorized according to the number and bonding of the carbon atoms in the aliphatic chain. Fats that are saturated fats have no double bonds between the carbons in the chain. Unsaturated fats have one or more double bonded carbons in the chain; the nomenclature is based on the non-acid end of the chain. This end is called the n-end, thus alpha-linolenic acid is called an omega-3 fatty acid because the 3rd carbon from that end is the first double bonded carbon in the chain counting from that end. Some oils and fats are therefore called polyunsaturated fats. Unsaturated fats can be further divided into cis fats, which are the most common in nature, trans fats, which are rare in nature. Unsaturated fats can be altered by reaction with hydrogen effected by a catalyst.
This action, called hydrogenation, tends to break all the double bonds and makes a saturated fat. To make vegetable shortening liquid cis-unsaturated fats such as vegetable oils are hydrogenated to produce saturated fats, which have more desirable physical properties e.g. they melt at a desirable temperature, store well, whereas polyunsaturated oils go rancid when they react with oxygen in the air. However, trans fats are generated during hydrogenation as contaminants created by an unwanted side reaction on the catalyst during partial hydrogenation. Saturated fats can stack themselves in a packed arrangement, so they can solidify and are solid at room temperature. For example, animal fats tallow and lard are solids. Olive and linseed oils on the other hand are liquid. Fats serve both as energy sources for the body, as stores for energy in excess of what the body needs immediately; each gram of fat when burned or metabolized releases about 9 food calories. Fats are broken down in the healthy body to release their constituents and fatty acids.
Glycerol itself can be converted to glucose by the liver and so become a source of energy. There are many different kinds of fats. All fats are derivatives of fatty acids and glycerol. Most fats are glycerides triglycerides. One chain of fatty acid is bonded to each of the three -OH groups of the glycerol by the reaction of the carboxyl end of the fatty acid with the alcohol. Water is eliminated and the carbons are linked by an -O- bond through dehydration synthesis; this process is called esterification and fats are therefore esters. As a simple visual illustration, if the kinks and angles of these chains were straightened out, the molecule would have the shape of a capital letter E; the fatty acids would each be a horizontal line. Fats therefore have "ester" bonds; the properties of any specific fat molecule depend on the particular fatty acids. Fatty acids form a family of compounds that are composed of increasing numbers of carbon atoms linked into a zig-zag chain; the more carbon atoms there are in any fatty acid, the longer its chain will be.
Long chains are more susceptible to intermolecular forces of attraction, so the longer ones melt at a higher temperature. Fatty acid chains may differ by length categorized as short to long. Short-chain fatty acids are fatty acids with aliphatic tails of fewer than six carbons. Medium-chain fatty acids are fatty acids with aliphatic tails of 6–12 carbons, which can form medium-chain triglycerides. Long-chain fatty acids are fatty acids with aliphatic tails of 13 to 21 carbons. Long chain fatty acids are fatty acids with aliphatic tails of 22 or more carbons. Any of these aliphatic fatty acid chains may be glycerated and the resultant fats may have tails of different lengths from short triformin to long, e.g. cerotic acid, or hexacosanoic acid, a 26-carbon long-chain saturated fatty acid. Long chain fats are exemplified by tallow. Most fats found in foo
Cultivar
The term cultivar most refers to an assemblage of plants selected for desirable characters that are maintained during propagation. More cultivar refers to the most basic classification category of cultivated plants in the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants. Most cultivars arose in cultivation. Popular ornamental garden plants like roses, daffodils and azaleas are cultivars produced by careful breeding and selection for floral colour and form; the world's agricultural food crops are exclusively cultivars that have been selected for characters such as improved yield and resistance to disease, few wild plants are now used as food sources. Trees used in forestry are special selections grown for their enhanced quality and yield of timber. Cultivars form a major part of Liberty Hyde Bailey's broader group, the cultigen, defined as a plant whose origin or selection is due to intentional human activity. A cultivar is not the same as a botanical variety, a taxonomic rank below subspecies, there are differences in the rules for creating and using the names of botanical varieties and cultivars.
In recent times, the naming of cultivars has been complicated by the use of statutory patents for plants and recognition of plant breeders' rights. The International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants offers legal protection of plant cultivars to persons or organisations that introduce new cultivars to commerce. UPOV requires that a cultivar be "distinct, uniform", "stable". To be "distinct", it must have characters that distinguish it from any other known cultivar. To be "uniform" and "stable", the cultivar must retain these characters in repeated propagation; the naming of cultivars is an important aspect of cultivated plant taxonomy, the correct naming of a cultivar is prescribed by the Rules and Recommendations of the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants. A cultivar is given a cultivar name, which consists of the scientific Latin botanical name followed by a cultivar epithet; the cultivar epithet is in a vernacular language. For example, the full cultivar name of the King Edward potato is Solanum tuberosum'King Edward'.'King Edward' is the cultivar epithet, according to the Rules of the Cultivated Plant Code, is bounded by single quotation marks.
The word cultivar originated from the need to distinguish between wild plants and those with characteristics that arose in cultivation, presently denominated cultigens. This distinction dates to the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, the "Father of Botany", keenly aware of this difference. Botanical historian Alan Morton noted that Theophrastus in his Historia Plantarum "had an inkling of the limits of culturally induced changes and of the importance of genetic constitution"; the International Code of Nomenclature for algae and plants uses as its starting point for modern botanical nomenclature the Latin names in Linnaeus' Species Plantarum and Genera Plantarum. In Species Plantarum, Linnaeus enumerated all plants known to him, either directly or from his extensive reading, he recognised the rank of varietas and he indicated these varieties with letters of the Greek alphabet, such as α, β, λ, before the varietal name, rather than using the abbreviation "var." as is the present convention. Most of the varieties that Linnaeus enumerated were of "garden" origin rather than being wild plants.
In time the need to distinguish between wild plants and those with variations, cultivated increased. In the nineteenth century many "garden-derived" plants were given horticultural names, sometimes in Latin and sometimes in a vernacular language. From circa the 1900s, cultivated plants in Europe were recognised in the Scandinavian and Slavic literature as stamm or sorte, but these words could not be used internationally because, by international agreement, any new denominations had to be in Latin. In the twentieth century an improved international nomenclature was proposed for cultivated plants. Liberty Hyde Bailey of Cornell University in New York, United States created the word cultivar in 1923 when he wrote that: The cultigen is a species, or its equivalent, that has appeared under domestication – the plant is cultigenous. I now propose another name, for a botanical variety, or for a race subordinate to species, that has originated under cultivation, it is the equivalent of the botanical variety except in respect to its origin.
In that essay, Bailey used only the rank of species for the cultigen, but it was obvious to him that many domesticated plants were more like botanical varieties than species, that realization appears to have motivated the suggestion of the new category of cultivar. Bailey created the word cultivar, assumed to be a portmanteau of cultivated and variety. Bailey never explicitly stated the etymology of cultivar, it has been suggested that it is instead a contraction of cultigen and variety, which seems correct; the neologism cultivar was promoted as "euphonious" and "free from ambiguity". The first Cultivated Plant Code of 1953 subsequently commended its use, by 1960 it had achieved common international acceptance; the words cultigen and cultivar may be confused with
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the Pre-Columbian peoples of North and South America and their descendants. Although some indigenous peoples of the Americas were traditionally hunter-gatherers—and many in the Amazon basin, still are—many groups practiced aquaculture and agriculture; the impact of their agricultural endowment to the world is a testament to their time and work in reshaping and cultivating the flora indigenous to the Americas. Although some societies depended on agriculture, others practiced a mix of farming and gathering. In some regions the indigenous peoples created monumental architecture, large-scale organized cities, city-states, states and empires. Among these are the Aztec and Maya states that until the 16th century were among the most politically and advanced nations in the world, they had a vast knowledge of engineering, mathematics, writing, medicine and irrigation, mining and goldsmithing. Many parts of the Americas are still populated by indigenous peoples.
At least a thousand different indigenous languages are spoken in the Americas. Some, such as the Quechuan languages, Guaraní, Mayan languages and Nahuatl, count their speakers in millions. Many maintain aspects of indigenous cultural practices to varying degrees, including religion, social organization and subsistence practices. Like most cultures, over time, cultures specific to many indigenous peoples have evolved to incorporate traditional aspects but cater to modern needs; some indigenous peoples still live in relative isolation from Western culture and a few are still counted as uncontacted peoples. Indigenous peoples of the United States are known as Native Americans or American Indians and Alaska Natives. Application of the term "Indian" originated with Christopher Columbus, who, in his search for India, thought that he had arrived in the East Indies; those islands came to be known as the "West Indies", a name still used. This led to the blanket term "Indies" and "Indians" for the indigenous inhabitants, which implied some kind of racial or cultural unity among the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
This unifying concept, codified in law and politics, was not accepted by the myriad groups of indigenous peoples themselves, but has since been embraced or tolerated, by many over the last two centuries. Though the term "Indian" does not include the culturally and linguistically distinct indigenous peoples of the Arctic regions of the Americas—such as the Aleuts, Inuit or Yupik peoples, who entered the continent as a second more recent wave of migration several thousand years before and have much more recent genetic and cultural commonalities with the aboriginal peoples of the Asiatic Arctic Russian Far East—these groups are nonetheless considered "indigenous peoples of the Americas". Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, which includes not only First Nations and Arctic Inuit, but the minority population of First Nations-European mixed race Métis people who identify culturally and ethnically with indigenous peoplehood; this is contrasted, for instance, to the American Indian-European mixed race mestizos of Hispanic America who, with their larger population, identify as a new ethnic group distinct from both Europeans and Indigenous Americans, but still considering themselves a subset of the European-derived Hispanic or Brazilian peoplehood in culture and ethnicity.
The term Amerindian and its cognates find preferred use in scientific contexts and in Quebec, the Guianas and the English-speaking Caribbean. Indígenas or pueblos indígenas is a common term in Spanish-speaking countries and pueblos nativos or nativos may be heard, while aborigen is used in Argentina and pueblos originarios is common in Chile. In Brazil, indígenas or povos indígenas are common if formal-sounding designations, while índio is still the more often-heard term and aborígene and nativo being used in Amerindian-specific contexts; the Spanish and Portuguese equivalents to Indian could be used to mean any hunter-gatherer or full-blooded Indigenous person to continents other than Europe or Africa—for example, indios filipinos. The specifics of Paleo-Indian migration to and throughout the Americas, including the exact dates and routes traveled, are the subject of ongoing research and discussion. According to archaeological and genetic evidence and South America were the last continents in the world to gain human habitation.
During the Wisconsin glaciation, 50–17,000 years ago, falling sea levels allowed people to move across the land bridge of Beringia that joined Siberia to northwest North America. Alaska was a glacial refugium; the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered most of North America, blocking nomadic inhabitants and confining them to Alaska for thousands of years. Indigenous genetic studies suggest that the first inhabitants of the Americas share a single ancestral population, one that developed in isolation, conjectured to be Beringia; the isolat
Hybrid (biology)
In biology, a hybrid is the offspring resulting from combining the qualities of two organisms of different breeds, species or genera through sexual reproduction. Hybrids are not always intermediates between their parents, but can show hybrid vigour, sometimes growing larger or taller than either parent; the concept of a hybrid is interpreted differently in animal and plant breeding, where there is interest in the individual parentage. In genetics, attention is focused on the numbers of chromosomes. In taxonomy, a key question is how related the parent species are. Species are reproductively isolated by strong barriers to hybridisation, which include morphological differences, differing times of fertility, mating behaviors and cues, physiological rejection of sperm cells or the developing embryo; some act before fertilization and others after it. Similar barriers exist in plants, with differences in flowering times, pollen vectors, inhibition of pollen tube growth, somatoplastic sterility, cytoplasmic-genic male sterility and the structure of the chromosomes.
A few animal species and many plant species, are the result of hybrid speciation, including important crop plants such as wheat, where the number of chromosomes has been doubled. Human impact on the environment has resulted in an increase in the interbreeding between regional species, the proliferation of introduced species worldwide has resulted in an increase in hybridisation; this genetic mixing may threaten many species with extinction, while genetic erosion in crop plants may be damaging the gene pools of many species for future breeding. A form of intentional human-mediated hybridisation is the crossing of wild and domesticated species; this is common in modern agriculture. One such flower, Oenothera lamarckiana, was central to early genetics research into mutationism and polyploidy, it is more done in the livestock and pet trades. Human selective breeding of domesticated animals and plants has resulted is the development of distinct breeds. Hybrid humans existed in prehistory. For example and anatomically modern humans are thought to have interbred as as 40,000 years ago.
Mythological hybrids appear in human culture in forms as diverse as the Minotaur, blends of animals and mythical beasts such as centaurs and sphinxes, the Nephilim of the Biblical apocrypha described as the wicked sons of fallen angels and attractive women. The term hybrid is derived from Latin hybrida, used for crosses such as of a tame sow and a wild boar; the term came into popular use in English in the 19th century, though examples of its use have been found from the early 17th century. Conspicuous hybrids are popularly named with portmanteau words, starting in the 1920s with the breeding of tiger–lion hybrids. From the point of view of animal and plant breeders, there are several kinds of hybrid formed from crosses within a species, such as between different breeds. Single cross hybrids result from the cross between two true-breeding organisms which produces an F1 hybrid; the cross between two different homozygous lines produces an F1 hybrid, heterozygous. The F1 generation is phenotypically homogeneous, producing offspring that are all similar to each other.
Double cross hybrids result from the cross between two different F1 hybrids. Three-way cross hybrids result from the cross between an inbred line. Triple cross hybrids result from the crossing of two different three-way cross hybrids. Top cross hybrids result from the crossing of a top quality or pure-bred male and a lower quality female, intended to improve the quality of the offspring, on average. Population hybrids result from the crossing of plants or animals in one population with those of another population; these crosses between different breeds. In horticulture, the term stable hybrid is used to describe an annual plant that, if grown and bred in a small monoculture free of external pollen produces offspring that are "true to type" with respect to phenotype. Hybridisation can occur in the hybrid zones where the geographical ranges of species, subspecies, or distinct genetic lineages overlap. For example, the butterfly Limenitis arthemis has two major subspecies in North America, L. a. arthemis and L. a. astyanax.
The white admiral has a bright, white band on its wings, while the red-spotted purple has cooler blue-green shades. Hybridisation occurs between a narrow area across New England, southern Ontario, the Great Lakes, the "suture region", it is at these regions. Other hybrid zones have formed between described species of animals. From the point of view of genetics, several different kinds of hybrid can be distinguished. A genetic hybrid carries two different alleles of the same gene, where for instance one allele may code for a lighter coat colour than the other. A structural hybrid results from the fusion of gametes that have differing structure in at least one chromosome, as a result of structural abnormalities. A numerical hybrid results from the fusion of gamet
Mutation
In biology, a mutation is the permanent alteration of the nucleotide sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA or other genetic elements. Mutations result from errors during DNA replication or other types of damage to DNA, which may undergo error-prone repair, or cause an error during other forms of repair, or else may cause an error during replication. Mutations may result from insertion or deletion of segments of DNA due to mobile genetic elements. Mutations may or may not produce discernible changes in the observable characteristics of an organism. Mutations play a part in both normal and abnormal biological processes including: evolution and the development of the immune system, including junctional diversity; the genomes of RNA viruses are based on RNA rather than DNA. The RNA viral genome can be double single stranded. In some of these viruses replication occurs and there are no mechanisms to check the genome for accuracy; this error-prone process results in mutations.
Mutation can result in many different types of change in sequences. Mutations in genes can either have no effect, alter the product of a gene, or prevent the gene from functioning properly or completely. Mutations can occur in nongenic regions. One study on genetic variations between different species of Drosophila suggests that, if a mutation changes a protein produced by a gene, the result is to be harmful, with an estimated 70 percent of amino acid polymorphisms that have damaging effects, the remainder being either neutral or marginally beneficial. Due to the damaging effects that mutations can have on genes, organisms have mechanisms such as DNA repair to prevent or correct mutations by reverting the mutated sequence back to its original state. Mutations can involve the duplication of large sections of DNA through genetic recombination; these duplications are a major source of raw material for evolving new genes, with tens to hundreds of genes duplicated in animal genomes every million years.
Most genes belong to larger gene families of shared ancestry. Novel genes are produced by several methods through the duplication and mutation of an ancestral gene, or by recombining parts of different genes to form new combinations with new functions. Here, protein domains act as modules, each with a particular and independent function, that can be mixed together to produce genes encoding new proteins with novel properties. For example, the human eye uses four genes to make structures that sense light: three for cone cell or color vision and one for rod cell or night vision. Another advantage of duplicating a gene is. Other types of mutation create new genes from noncoding DNA. Changes in chromosome number may involve larger mutations, where segments of the DNA within chromosomes break and rearrange. For example, in the Homininae, two chromosomes fused to produce human chromosome 2. In evolution, the most important role of such chromosomal rearrangements may be to accelerate the divergence of a population into new species by making populations less to interbreed, thereby preserving genetic differences between these populations.
Sequences of DNA that can move about the genome, such as transposons, make up a major fraction of the genetic material of plants and animals, may have been important in the evolution of genomes. For example, more than a million copies of the Alu sequence are present in the human genome, these sequences have now been recruited to perform functions such as regulating gene expression. Another effect of these mobile DNA sequences is that when they move within a genome, they can mutate or delete existing genes and thereby produce genetic diversity. Nonlethal mutations increase the amount of genetic variation; the abundance of some genetic changes within the gene pool can be reduced by natural selection, while other "more favorable" mutations may accumulate and result in adaptive changes. For example, a butterfly may produce offspring with new mutations; the majority of these mutations will have no effect. If this color change is advantageous, the chances of this butterfly's surviving and producing its own offspring are a little better, over time the number of butterflies with this mutation may form a larger percentage of the population.
Neutral mutations are defined as mutations whose effects do not influence the fitness of an individual. These can increase in frequency over time due to genetic drift, it is believed that the overwhelming majority of mutations have no significant effect on an organism's fitness. DNA repair mechanisms are able to mend most changes before they become permanent mutations, many organisms have mechanisms for eliminating otherwise-permanently mutated somatic cells. Beneficial mutations can improve reproductive success. Mutationism is one of several alternatives to evolution by natural selection that have existed both before and after the publication of Charles Darwin's 1859 book, On the Origin of Species. In the theory, mutation was the source of novelty
