Bottled seaside air! It almost sounds like a scam from the Victorian era when the bracing “ozone” of fresh air at the British seaside was said to cure all kinds of ailments and led to a boom in seaside resorts and continues to ebb and flow.
But, it’s not a scam. Researchers at the University of East Anglia have been plucking bacteria from the North Norfolk coast at a little village called Stiffkey (pronounced Stoo-Kee) and fermenting them to reproduce the marshy smell of the seaside in the laboratory.
Andrew Johnston and his team isolated the bacterium from the mud at Stiffkey saltmarsh and have identified the single gene responsible for the emission of the strong-smelling gas, dimethyl sulfide (DMS).
“On bracing childhood visits to the seaside we were always told to “breathe in that ozone, it’s good for you’,” said Prof Johnston. “But we were misled, twice over,” he adds, “First, that distinctive smell is not ozone [a highly toxic allotrope of oxygen], it is dimethyl sulfide. And secondly, inhaling it is not necessarily good for you.”
DMS is a little known but important gas. Across the world’s oceans, seas and coasts, tens of millions of tonnes are released by microbes that live near plankton and marine plants, including seaweeds and some salt-marsh plants. The gas plays an important role in the formation of cloud cover over the oceans, with major effects on climate.
Intriguingly, DMS acts as a homing scent for seabirds, almost like the odour of Brussels sprouts at a festive dinner table – it helps birds sniff out food in the lonely oceans, even at astonishingly low concentrations. Understanding the role of microbes in producing this key chemical is important in understanding a whole range of ecosystems.
The discovery adds to the diverse list of Stiffkey’s claims to fame. The small coastal village is renowned for its ‘Stewkey Blue’ cockles and was also the home of Henry Williamson, author of “Tarka the Otter”. It’s also known for its infamous rector, Reverend Harold Davidson, who was defrocked in 1932 after allegedly “cavorting with” London prostitutes. The pronunciation of the village’s name itself is even controversial with the older locals preferring the archaic Stoo-Kee, while the incomers often prefer the posher sounding and phonetic Stiff-Key. (Incidentally, my photograph of beachhuts at the head of this article was taken along the coast at Wells-next-the-Sea.
Swiss chemists have devised a new approach to the familiar analytical technique of Raman spectroscopy that allows them to investigate the structure of individual molecules.
Advocates of nuclear power point to recent advances in waste storage materials that could allow the radioactive byproducts of the nuclear industry to be stored safely and indefinitely in ceramics rather than glass. Whereas those not in favour of splitting atoms to produce almost limitless energy point out that even vitrified nuclear waste will represent an ongoing problem for thousands of years.
Two back-to-back papers in the well-known chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie recently could have potentially serious consequences for the pharmaceutical industry, because they reveal what the authors claim are inherent ambiguities in the crystalline forms of aspirin.
Researchers from Slovenia have used spectroscopy to home in on the active site of an essential bacterial enzyme, DNA gyrase. They say they now understand more clearly how a compound found in green tea, EGCG, which is a health-boosting antioxidant, works to kill bacteria.
A simple Q tip is all it takes to grab a microscopic sample from a work of art for laboratory testing, according to Canadian analytical chemists. They’ve used the approach to sample darkening pigments from an ancient map and from a piece of modern art as proof of principle.
Regular readers will recall my mention of the