Should you ever watch a duck float throughout a pond, gobbling up the vegetation coating the floor, that fowl is method forward of its time. The buoyant greenery is azolla, a tiny fern that grows like loopy, doubling its biomass as rapidly as each two days to beat small our bodies of water. The duck doesn’t realize it—and who might blame it, actually—however azolla might quickly unfold throughout human civilization, changing into meals for individuals and livestock, fertilizer for crops, and even biofuel.
“I’m not out right here saying everyone ought to go eat these things straight away,” says analysis technologist Daniel Winstead, who’s finding out azolla at Penn State. “There’s loads of work that must be achieved. However boy, it’s received a lot potential.”
The principle cause you wouldn’t wish to go scoop some azolla out of a pond and eat it duck-style is, initially, yuck. But additionally, beforehand studied species of azolla are usually excessive in polyphenols, a household of compounds discovered in lots of forms of plant. In small portions, polyphenols act as antioxidants, that means they assist take away sure dangerous substances from the physique. However in azolla portions, polyphenols might intervene with the physique’s means to soak up vitamins. At such ranges, not solely are they not nutritious, they’re anti-nutritious.
However there’s a species—Carolina azolla, native to the southeastern United States—that doesn’t have this downside. Testing for polyphenolic content material, Winstead discovered this azolla to have a lot, a lot decrease ranges than different species, truly extra in keeping with the mainstay vegetables and fruit People eat. And when Winstead ready Carolina azolla in three other ways—fermentation, boiling, and strain cooking—he discovered this decreased the polyphenolic content material nonetheless additional, by 62, 88, and 92 %, respectively. (In keeping with cooks, azolla is “crisp and juicy,” tasting “considerably of earth, steel, minerals, mushrooms, moss, and grass.”)
This, Winstead believes, might be the important thing to creating azolla a standard meals worldwide. “You could possibly use these cooking strategies on these different species of azolla from Asia,” says Winstead, who described the findings in a current paper. “That would scale back polyphenol content material to a stage that was not limiting.”
In comparison with different greens, Carolina azolla is excessive in zinc, manganese, iron, calcium, and potassium, and is comparatively excessive in protein (although has lower than a grain like barley). And that’s from wild azolla. “Wheat, rice, barley, soybeans—all this stuff have been domesticated and cultivated, selecting for attributes like diet,” says Winstead. “So simply think about if individuals did that for azolla, if you happen to might create an azolla pressure that creates a complete bunch of precursors for biodiesel. You could possibly create one other one which creates tons of protein.”
Once more, Winstead isn’t suggesting that anybody exit and harvest their native pond for azolla. However with additional analysis, azolla has the potential to develop into a extra extensively cultivated crop, particularly if scientists can breed it to specific much more vitamins. They’ll additionally must additional vet the plant to ensure it isn’t poisonous in different methods. “I feel there’s a actual chance for its use as a foodstuff sooner or later, supplied there’s in depth analysis on doable toxin content material attributable to their symbiotic cyanobacteria,” says Winstead. “Corn is at present used as biofuel, livestock feed, and a foodstuff, and I feel azolla holds an identical potential.”
