while allowing the new compound to be patented. He conducted a few promising tests and then convinced a drug company to buy his patents for more than $7 million. The drug company tried without
success to reproduce the scientist’s work and eventually dropped the project. In the meantime, the researcher contended that the dose of resveratrol required to produce measurable health benefits was far in excess of the amount to be obtained by a few glasses of red wine per day.
The media bought into his story and the work of several conscientious researchers was called into question.
message. It’s not easy to get money for research if the funding agency can’t make a profit when it produces the product. In spite of this, research is continuing.
The most recent finding is that, yes, the amount of resveratrol consumed from
lesser extent in yeast and some bacteria. Independently from resveratrol
Resveratrol molecule
The worst case was that of a senior scientist who had published many excellent papers concerning resveratrol activity. His university accused him of fabricating the results of many of his scientific papers. He was fired from his university job and some of his papers were retracted from scientific journals. He committed suicide.
If you read the material posted about resveratrol on the web, there is no clear
one or two glasses of red wine per day can produce measurable results. The resveratrol target was thought to be a group of genes that control the synthesis of sirtuins, but may be even more broad ranging.
Sirtuins are proteins that affect such processes as inflammation, stress resistance, energy efficiency, circadian clocks, and alertness during low-calorie situations.
There are seven sirtuins known in mammals, but they also occur to a
research, sirtuin research is being conducted to study effects on Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and aging. It’s really weird that a compound synthesized by grapes and a great many other plants could have such a profound impact on human well being. The answer to this is that resveratrol is a phytoalexin, part of the plant’s defence against bacterial and fungal infections. The genes for its utilization are common to both the plant and animal kingdoms and have been inherited from a time in which we had common ancestors.
The theory is that we simply had the gene when we began to separate into other species and found an alternate beneficial use for it.
Resveratrol content is enhanced in grapes infected with mycorrhizae or challenged by a mildew infection. It occurs mainly in the skins, thus skin contact during fermentation extracts more resveratrol than if the skins are removed earlier in the processing. With a little creative fiction we could turn this into a movie.
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British Columbia FRUIT GROWER • Spring 2015
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