US Army enlists biotech
That elusive fragrance
Balanced view needed at Cancun – CIAA
Internal Food spreads wings
Airing your details
Interbrew shares China with Lion

Biotech

US Army enlists biotech

The US Army is chipping in $50m over five years towards the costs of applying biological mechanisms to make new materials and devices for the modern soldier.

Lead by the University of California’s Santa Barbara, researchers from the California and Massachusetts Institutes of Technology, will form the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies (ICB).

Daniel Morse of UCSB, who works in the emerging field of nano-biomolecular and biomimetic materials synthesis, will be director of the new institute. Six industrial partners, including IBM, will develop the technologies created in the university laboratories, potentially translating the research findings into products for the civilian marketplace.

The idea driving the research is that nature creates high-performance materials in a non-toxic way and assembles them at the nanoscale with a level of precision currently beyond human capability. ICB aims to study and replicate some of those processes to benefit industry and the public.

Top of the list of potential applications are sensing, processing and storage. The MIT group will look at how biological organisms grow and assemble semiconductor and magnetic materials using environmentally friendly synthesis routes. These organisms can form liquid crystals for display technology and as components for self-assembling electronics.

The Army expects to use these in “precision strike, signature management, chem/bio and particulate environmental protection, and counter-terrorism”.

Neutron bomb 

That elusive fragrance

US government researchers have teamed up with aroma chemists at International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) to bombard materials with beams of chilled neutrons to discern to see just how aroma compounds are embedded. The aim is to model more effectively the interaction between carrier molecules and fragrances, reports The Alchemist.

IFF’s Chii-Fen Wang hopes the work will show precisely where the fragrance compound exists in the present onion-like model, and how it changes.

Chilling the neutrons slows them down and allows the researchers to explore structures between one and 100 nanometres in size. The work, at the NIST Center for Neutron Research, will allow IFF to improve ways to formulate chemical carriers for specific products, like fragrances or detergents. They hope to avoid some unwanted molecular changes that can ruin an aroma.

The development is the latest chemicals research news from IFF, which recently said it has a new chemical encapsulation technology, which provides better flavour and stability for up to two years, and improves top note retention.

Free but fair

Balanced view needed at Cancun – CIAA

The European food and beverage industry spokesman, the CIAA, has called the World Trade Organisation’s Cancun meeting this week to create a rules-based multilateral trading system and better market access, as well as the removal of trade-distorting subsidies.

It asked the meeting to endorse protection of intellectual property rights such as products that reflect their geographic source of origin, such as Champagne wines and Roquefort cheese.

It added “It would be more appropriate for the agreement on agriculture to provide to developing countries a treatment that is graduated according to their individual economic situation.”

New deals

Internal Food spreads wings

US-based International Food Products Group is using its Golden Choice Foods brands to expand its snack food business into complimentary items such as Colombian coffee and imported organic vegetables. It has also improved its import and export capabilities through an affiliation with Tokyo-based Silverado Corp.

Chief executive Richard Damion added that Ted Hamilton, a director of Australia’s Solgran and agricultural technology exporter Nev-Agri, will join the board.

Prints on the air

Airing your details

Just as we get to grips with radio-based systems that identify retail products comes the news that a US firm is about to do the same thing for humans.

Next year Parco Wireless and Akoura Biometrics will launch the Spectral Biometrics Card. They claim it is the first product to combine the new PAL650 ultra-wideband radio tag and biometric (fingerprint) authentication. Parco will supply the radio system and Akoura will provide the authentication system.

Your fingerprints will be stored on a card the size of a common credit card. A reader scans your fingerprints and sends them via secure ultra-wideband radio to a system that compares the data with that stored on the card.

This offers longer read ranges, anti-theft protection, highly secure access control, and multiple uses of the card. For example the card can also be used for point-of-sale purchases or as a positive ID system.

Deal done

Interbrew shares China with Lion

Interbrew has teamed up with Lion Group, a diversified Malaysian group, to tackle the beer business in China, now the world’s biggest single beer market. The deal puts Interbrew third in China in terms of volume, with almost 9% of the market (21m hectolitres).

Interbrew will pay US$131.5m for a 50% share of Lion's China brewing activities and take management control. It will also have a 12-month call option on the other half for the same price.
Interbrew has been active in China since 1984. It bought the Nanjing and Jingling Breweries in 1997, and in 2002 acquired a 24% share in Zhujiang Joint Stock Company, China's fifth largest, and 70% of Zhejiang-based KK Group's brewing business.