For those who ever watch a duck float throughout a pond, gobbling up the vegetation coating the floor, that chicken is approach 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 overcome 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, turning into meals for folks and livestock, fertilizer for crops, and even biofuel.
“I’m not out right here saying all people ought to go eat these things immediately,” says analysis technologist Daniel Winstead, who’s learning azolla at Penn State. “There’s plenty of work that must be finished. However boy, it’s bought a lot potential.”
The principle purpose you wouldn’t need to go scoop some azolla out of a pond and eat it duck-style is, to begin with, yuck. But in addition, beforehand studied species of azolla are usually excessive in polyphenols, a household of compounds discovered in lots of kinds of plant. In small portions, polyphenols act as antioxidants, which means they assist take away sure dangerous substances from the physique. However in azolla portions, polyphenols might intervene with the physique’s potential 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 fruit and veggies People eat. And when Winstead ready Carolina azolla in three alternative ways—fermentation, boiling, and stress cooking—he discovered this decreased the polyphenolic content material nonetheless additional, by 62, 88, and 92 p.c, respectively. (In response to cooks, azolla is “crisp and juicy,” tasting “considerably of earth, metallic, minerals, mushrooms, moss, and grass.”)
This, Winstead believes, may very well be the important thing to creating azolla a typical meals worldwide. “You can use these cooking strategies on these different species of azolla from Asia,” says Winstead, who described the findings in a latest paper. “That would scale back polyphenol content material to a degree 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 vitamin,” says Winstead. “So simply think about if folks did that for azolla, should you might create an azolla pressure that creates an entire bunch of precursors for biodiesel. You can 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 turn into a extra extensively cultivated crop, particularly if scientists can breed it to precise much more vitamins. They’ll additionally have to 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, offered there’s intensive analysis on attainable toxin content material on account of 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.”