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Gut-friendly bush tucker bread takes off in Darwin

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A superfood bread roll made with Australian native bush foods and developed by University of Queensland researchers is now on the menu at Qantas Club in Darwin.

UQ’s Associate Professor Yasmina Sultanbawa worked with Indigenous employment provider Karen Sheldon Group to develop a healthy, long-life wholemeal bread using wattle seed and Kakadu plum rather than artificial additives.

“The wattle seed bread is uniquely Australian, all-natural and very nutritious,” Dr Sultanbawa said.

“One wattle seed bread roll gives you the recommended daily intake of iron, zinc and dietary fibre – in fact one roll contains two-and-a-half times the iron, six times the potassium and nearly five times the zinc of an average white-bread equivalent.”

Dr Sultanbawa said ground wattle seed acted as a natural emulsifier to extend shelf life, while the powdered Kakadu plum was a natural bread improver.

With funding from the Australian Government’s Innovation Connections program, Dr Sultanbawa and her team at the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Innovation worked to create the gut-friendly bread from ingredients harvested by Aboriginal communities.

The team collaborated in the kitchen, the laboratory and in communities.

“We had to identify which species of wattle seed, and how much of this seed would work in the bread, and we had to measure the nutritional benefits and storage potential,” Dr Sultanbawa said.

“It was a question of investigating how each cultivar of wattle seed would behave when cooked.

“For example, Acacia victoriae has a coffee aroma when roasted, so you can’t put that into bread.

“Some seeds contained a fair amount of fat and we thought they might develop some rancid notes, so we started eliminating based on aroma and flavor.

“Seed from Acacia coriacea, an indigenous wattle seed, performed the best.”

Director of the Karen Sheldon Group Sarah Hickey, said in addition to the Qantas lounge, she was hoping to find a big buyer to enable production of the bread on a larger scale.

“It would be great to see an Aboriginal-owned and operated business make this bread as a par-baked product that could be frozen for at least 12 months and sold to remote communities so that they can benefit in terms of great consumer nutrition as well as the employment benefits,” Ms Hickey said.

Dr Sultanbawa said it was rewarding to work on projects where the benefits went back into communities.

“Once the demand comes we can increase the supply, and then Indigenous communities can reap the social, cultural and economic benefits of developing social enterprises on their own land,” she said.

“I’d love to see the rolls included on Qantas’s inflight menus one day.”

Dr Sultanbawa and her QAAFI team received a Business and Higher Education Round Table (BHERT) Community Engagement award in 2017 for work with Aboriginal communities, government, researchers and industry to develop a Kakadu plum natural preservative for ready-made meals.

QAAFI is a UQ research institute supported by the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, Queensland.

UQ extends #1 Nature ranking run

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The University of Queensland is number one in Australia in the Nature Index of high-quality research outputs, maintaining the coveted position in the annual table.

UQ continued its climb up the global Nature rankings, to be 79th in the world from all research institutions, up from 110th last year.

President and Vice-Chancellor Professor Peter Høj said the University’s improved position in a fiercely competitive international environment was an outstanding result.

“Our commitment to high quality, high impact research is unwavering and the Nature Index ranking is an important validation of these efforts,” Professor Høj said.

“Researchers across our faculties and institutes are striving to improve health, the environment and society.

“There is a network of staff and science infrastructure that supports their efforts, and this result is evidence of the hard work and dedication of a massive team.”

Professor Peter Høj said the Nature ranking included all types of global research institutes including the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck Institute and the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

UQ ranks 69th in the world when excluding non-academic institutions, up from 91st in 2018.

“In addition to being number one in Australia overall, UQ was also the top-ranked institution for research in the areas of Earth and Environment, and Life Sciences,” he said.

“These are among the areas where we can make a profound difference to peoples’ lives, to the world around us, and how we equip our children for the future.

“Just last week, researchers from our Degnan laboratory published research in Nature that upended biologists’ century-old understanding of the evolutionary history of animals.

“The previous day, a team at our Institute for Molecular Bioscience reported on research identifying a possible drug target for chronic liver disease.”

The release of the Nature Index closely followed UQ’s improved top 50 results in two other global rankings.

UQ moved to 47th in the 2020 QS World University Rankings, and jumped to 40th – its highest-ever position – in National Taiwan University’s Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities.

“These results will make UQ even more attractive to the best and brightest researchers and students and help us draw top-tier, quality staff from around the world,” Professor Høj said.

UQ pushes higher in QS, NTU global rankings

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The University of Queensland has climbed higher in two global university ranking tables, enhancing its position among the world’s top 50 and confirming it as number one in the state.

UQ moved to 47th in the 2020 QS World University Rankings, and jumped to 40th  – its highest-ever position – in National Taiwan University’s Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities.

In the QS report, UQ’s employer reputation ranking – up seven places – was among improvements for a range of benchmarks, and the greatest increase of any Go8 university in this category.

Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Peter Høj AC said staff in all areas of UQ should be proud of the QS and NTU results.

“At a time when some governments overseas are investing heavily in their university systems, to not only hold but improve our position in the world’s top 50 in these important tables is an impressive achievement,” Professor Høj said.

“The result reflects the exceptional quality of education and research across a broad range of fields and disciplines at UQ, which is critical to achieving globally significant solutions to complex problems through partnerships and innovation.”

The QS survey tracks universities’ standing and reputation, with academic and employer reputation together accounting for 50 per cent of its criteria.

UQ’s academic reputation climbed to 45th in the QS ranking, up from 48th last year, while employer reputation rose to 69th in the world.

“UQ’s approach to student employability focuses on developing graduates into individuals who can make a positive contribution and add value to organisations, the workforce, and the community,” Professor Høj said.

“We have embedded discipline-specific career development learning support into our programs, engaging students with industry contacts in relevant and meaningful professional relationships.

“Our investment creates opportunities for students to participate in learning experiences across a range of activities including global mobility, entrepreneurship, volunteering and mentoring.

“It is pleasing to see UQ rise in the employer reputation indicator ranking which can be taken as an endorsement of our sector-leading approach adopted in 2014.”

UQ’s QS ranking as an international student destination jumped dramatically to 34th in the latest survey, up from 57th last year.

NTU’s latest ranking table puts UQ at 40th globally, up from 43rd.

The NTU ranking is focused on the number and impact of scientific publications authored by the University’s researchers and considers research productivity, impact and excellence.

In NTU’s field rankings, UQ was first in Australia and fifth globally for agricultural sciences.

In NTU subject areas, UQ was number one in Australia in Environment/Ecology (fourth globally), Microbiology (14th globally), Social Sciences General (14th globally) and Agricultural Studies (16th globally).

UQ was ranked second in Australia in Pharmacology and Toxicology (14th globally), Plant & Animal Science (18th globally), Civil Engineering (29th globally), Biology & Biochemistry (30th globally), Chemical Engineering (42nd globally), Molecular Biology & Genetics (42nd globally) and Chemistry (72nd globally).

Researchers discover new drug target for liver disease treatment

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A possible drug target for chronic liver disease has been identified by an international research collaboration involving a University of Queensland team.

Professor Matt Sweet and Dr Divya Ramnath from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) worked with the study’s senior author Dr Ekihiro Seki from Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, to identify genes linked to the progression of chronic liver disease.

Dr Ramnath said they helped confirm that a molecule called hyaluronan (HA), used as a marker for liver disease, also has a role in disease progression.

“Testing for HA levels in the blood can indicate the severity of liver disease in patients, but until now its exact role in disease progression had not been completely understood,” Dr Ramnath said.

“Using clinical samples provided by Professor Elizabeth Powell from UQ’s Faculty of Medicine, we were able to confirm that an enzyme which makes HA was at higher levels in patients with later stages of the disease.

“This means it’s not just a marker, it’s now a potential drug target.”

Chronic liver disease is reaching epidemic proportions with up to 30 per cent of the world’s population experiencing fat build up in the liver, known as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).

A proportion of NAFLD patients progress to a more severe form of the disease called non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).

“NAFLD can be slowed by changes in diet but if untreated constant liver damage and inflammation can lead to a condition associated with cirrhosis and liver cancer.

“There are currently no medications to treat some forms of chronic liver disease so new drug targets are desperately needed,” Dr Ramnath said.

Professor Sweet said it is now understood that short forms of the HA molecule could create an immune response, causing inflammation and increased severity of the disease.

“It has been very rewarding working with Dr Seki from Cedars-Sinai, who has gone on to show that if HA production is inhibited in mice, the severity of the disease is reduced,” he said.

“This international collaboration has advanced our knowledge of this complex and prevalent disease, and the findings from this study may ultimately provide a strategy to develop much needed treatments.”

Evolutionary discovery to rewrite textbooks

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Scientists at The University of Queensland have upended biologists’ century-old understanding of the evolutionary history of animals.

Using new technology to investigate how multi-celled animals developed, their findings, published in Nature, revealed a surprising truth.

Professor Bernie Degnan said the results contradicted years of tradition.

“We’ve found that the first multicellular animals probably weren’t like the modern-day sponge cells, but were more like a collection of convertible cells,” Professor Degnan said.

“The great-great-great-grandmother of all cells in the animal kingdom, so to speak, was probably quite similar to a stem cell.

“This is somewhat intuitive as, compared to plants and fungi, animals have many more cell types, used in very different ways – from neurons to muscles – and cell-flexibility has been critical to animal evolution from the start.”

The findings disprove a long-standing idea: that multi-celled animals evolved from a single-celled ancestor resembling a modern sponge cell known as a choanocyte.

“Scattered throughout the history of evolution are major transitions, including the leap from a world of microscopic single-cells to a world of multi-celled animals,” Professor Degnan said.

“With multicellularity came incredible complexity, creating the animal, plant, fungi and algae kingdoms we see today.

“These large organisms differ from the other more-than-99-per-cent of biodiversity that can only be seen under a microscope.”

The team mapped individual cells, sequencing all of the genes expressed, allowing the researchers to compare similar types of cells over time.

Fellow senior author Associate Professor Sandie Degnan said this meant they could tease out the evolutionary history of individual cell types, by searching for the ‘signatures’ of each type.

“Most biologists for decades believed the existing theory to be true, as sponge choanocytes look so much like single-celled choanoflagellates – the organism considered to be the closest living relatives of the animals,” she said.

“But their transcriptome signatures simply don’t match, meaning that these aren’t the core building blocks of animal life that we originally thought they were.

“This technology has been used only for the last few years, but it’s helped us finally address an age-old question, discovering something completely contrary to what anyone had ever proposed.”

“We’re taking a core theory of evolutionary biology and turning it on its head,” she said.

“Now we have an opportunity to re-imagine the steps that gave rise to the first animals, the underlying rules that turned single cells into multicellular animal life.”

Professor Degnan said he hoped the revelation would help us understand our own condition and our understanding of our own stem cells and cancer.

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