ISIS Report 05/01/04
Assessing Food Quality by Its After-Glow
Measuring the weak light re-emitted by cells and organisms may tell
us a lot about them. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho
reports
The extensive sources and diagram for this article is
posted on ISIS Members’ website. Details here.
I first became aware of some unusual research at a conference organised
by Clive Kilmister, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, King’s College,
London, in 1985, on "Disequilibrium and Self-organisation". There, I met, among
others, German physicist Fritz Popp, whose talk meant almost nothing to me
then, except for the claim that organisms are "coherent", and that the proof of
coherence was in the characteristics of the extremely weak after-glow that
organisms emit immediately after briefly stimulated with light.
That meeting changed my whole field of research, thanks to
collaborative work with Fritz Popp, who taught me a lot about quantum physics,
and later, with Franco Musumeci’s team in Catania University, Sicily,
which continues my incredible voyage of discovery.
Coherent "biophotons"
I later learned that most materials glow in the dark after they have
been exposed to light, but the after-glow emitted by all living cells and
organisms is different. It is also different from the much more intense
fluorescence exhibited by certain chemical compounds, or the strong flashes of
light emitted by fireflies due to special biochemical reactions that generate
light.
Living cells and organisms also emit extremely low levels of light
spontaneously, as Alexander Gurvich discovered in Russia in 1923. He thought
this light was involved in intercommunication between cells.
Fifty years later, Fritz-Albert Popp built the first photon detector
sensitive enough to study these "biophotons", as he calls them. Popp, too,
believes cells and organisms use biophotons to intercommunicate. Moreover, he
thinks that both the spontaneously emitted biophotons as well as the after-glow
stimulated by external light are coherent, and come from a coherent
"light-field" in the cells and organisms. In other words, biophotons represent
an extremely weak as well as a most unusual laser light emitted by the
living system; a laser that covers a broad range of frequencies, from the
ultra-violet to the infrared, and probably beyond, into the microwave and
radio-frequency range.
Although many laboratories have been able to detect biophotons, the
coherence of biophotons is much disputed. Many scientists believe they are no
more than the result of "imperfections" or "mistakes" in the biochemical
reactions taking place in the body. But decades of empirical research by Popp
and others have shown without doubt that all cells and organisms emit
biophotons, the characteristics of which are intimately dependent on their
physiological state.
There is also a lot of other evidence indicating that organisms are
highly coherent, if not quantum coherent (see The Rainbow and the Worm, The
Physics of Organisms – thereafter abbreviated to "The Rainbow
Worm" - now available from ISIS’ online store).
Biophotons and food quality
Some of the most revealing findings on biophotons were made in
connection with food and other agricultural products. Popp’s laboratory
pioneered food quality research with support coming from some of the biggest
food companies. He and his coworkers found it possible to distinguish organic
tomatoes from conventionally grown tomatoes from a supermarket. Similarly,
free-range eggs could be distinguished from battery-hen eggs, and the
germination rate of barley seeds could be predicted from their after-glow.
Popp’s work has inspired many other laboratories around the world.
Some have devoted major efforts to assessing food quality. It is not hard to
understand why a simple, non-destructive method such as biophoton emission is
needed.
For example, cherry tomatoes (Lycopersicon esculentum var.
cerasiforme) are harvested at various stages to ripen on storage. The
storage-ripened tomatoes looked the same in colour, size and degree of
firmness, but human tasters are able to distinguish those picked earlier as
less sweet and less tasty, and having more "off-flavour" than those picked
later. And this could be confirmed by chemical methods to assess sugar and
solid contents. The drawback is that the chemical tests destroy the tomatoes
and many of them are costly and time-consuming to carry out.
By measuring the after-glow, the research team led by Franco Musumeci
in Catania University was able to distinguish the earlier picked tomatoes
without any difficulty.
The after-glow or "delayed luminescence" (DL) is measured within a
hundred milliseconds (or earlier) after the brief pulse of stimulating light is
off. DL typically starts at a high level, and decays ‘hyperbolically’
(as a function of time) back to the background in seconds, or sometimes
minutes.
Musumeci and his colleagues found, first of all, that the intensity of
the after-glow decreased as the tomatoes matured, and was closely correlated
with the decrease in the rate of respiration as well as the increase in the
redness of the tomatoes. In other words, the greener, and less mature the
tomatoes, the higher the DL. The DL of all samples dropped during the storage
period.
By the end of the storage period of ten days, all the tomatoes were the
same indistinguishable shade of red. But striking differences remained in the
intensity DL, which decreased with the maturity of the fruit at
harvesting and the increase in sugar content (or "Solids", see Fig. 1).
Figure 1. Delayed luminescence and colour as a function
of solids in cherry tomatoes.
Biophotons and seed quality
Seed quality is as important as food quality, if not more so, as the
profitability of agriculture depends on it. The farmer wants a seed lot that
give a high rate of germination quickly and the resulting seedlings to develop
into vigorous plants. Stress can affect seed viability and vigour during all
stages of production, harvesting drying, storage, packaging and transport.
In a study carried out in 1994, Musumeci’s group had established
that soybean seeds heat stressed for varying periods of time had decreased
growth rates proportional to the length of heat stress, while the intensity of
DL increased proportionately. There were also significant disturbances
to the decay times of the DL, tending to shorten it.
Research carried out by others have shown that seeds improve and recover
vigour after ‘priming’, or being soaked in osmotically active agents
such as polyethylene glycol (PEG). Many molecular and physiological processes
are correlated with the loss of seed vigour, among which, the accumulation of
gene and chromosome mutations, loss of integrity of ribosomal RNA, decrease in
membrane phospholipid content and increase in fatty acids.
The improvement in vigour following priming was correlated with
completion of DNA repair during priming and a more favourable metabolic balance
of the primed seeds at the start of germination in water.
Studies on capsicum pepper seeds carried out by the Plant Breeding and
Seed Production group in the University of Torino, Italy, showed that cells of
the embryo in the dried seeds arrest the cell cycle at the ‘G1
phase’, before DNA is synthesized in the nucleus. Priming in PEG solutions
induced DNA synthesis in the embryo root tips. Within each seed lot, a
significant direct correlation was seen between the frequency of
priming-induced nuclear replication and the improvement in seed vigour, as
measured by the reduction in the mean time to germination. But, the amount of
priming-induced nuclear replication was also correlated with the degree of seed
deterioration, so nuclear replication by itself may not be a reliable guide of
improvement or seed vigour.
Musumeci’s group teamed up with researchers in Torino to
investigate whether delayed luminescence could (literally) throw further light
on the issue.
They found that keeping the seeds at 45C for 4 and 6 days led to a
progressive increase in intensity of DL compared with controls, which was
significant after 6 days. No significant changes in germination rate was
observed, while the mean germination time increased from 5 days in controls to
7.8 days after 6 days at 45C.
Priming control seeds for 6 and 12 days had no significant effect on
the germination rate, but significantly shortened the mean germination time to
3.5 and 2.9 days respectively. The percent of nuclei entering G2 phase (making
DNA) increased from 0 to 8.5% and 20% respectively. This was accompanied by
significant decreases in the intensity of DL.
The seeds kept at 45C for 4 days responded to priming for 6 days by a
significant shortening of the mean germination time from 5.5 days to 3.3 days.
No nuclei had entered the G2 phase, but the DL had decreased significantly,
indicating that the improvements in priming were independent of DNA synthesis.
After priming for 12 days, germination rate
decreased from 92% in the unprimed seeds to 83%, 13.6% of the nuclei
entered G2 phase and there was a further reduction in the DL.
Seeds kept at 45C for 6 days and primed for 6 days showed a slight
shortening of mean germination time and a small reduction in the intensity of
DL, again without any nuclei entering G2 phase. After priming for 12 days, the
mean germination time had shortened from 7.8 days to 3.4 days, the germination
rate had also gone down from 92 to 85.5%, 10.1% of the nuclei had entered G2
phase and DL had decreased sharply.
Further analysis of the data showed that the intensity of DL was highly
correlated with mean germination time, that is, the longer the mean germination
time, the higher the DL.
So DL appears to be a better predictor of some aspects of seed vigour
than nuclear replication.
What does it all mean?
The orthodox scientific community has difficulty understanding these
results. They are used to the idea that light is emitted by specific
light-emitting molecules (or chromophores). But that is immediately
contradicted by the fact that biophotons consist of light of a wide, continuous
range of frequencies, rather than a single or a few frequencies as would be the
case if special light-emitting molecules were involved.
All the findings indicate that biophotons come from the entire cell or
organism, which is behaving rather like a special ‘solid state’
device with energy stored throughout the system, as I have suggested in The
Rainbow Worm.
The external light goes to excite the system as a whole. The excited
energy is distributed throughout the system and eventually part of it is
re-emitted as light over a wide band of frequencies, reflecting the complex
excitation state of the whole.
Of course, the analogy with a solid-state device - which originated
with solid-state physicist Herbert Fröhlich - is very crude, like the
analogy of biophotons with laser light. First of all, the organism, and even
the single cell, has a complex, nested organisation that’s unrivalled in
any artificial solid-state device. Cells have their own skeleton, compartments,
and tiny organs studded with molecular machines turning autonomously,
transforming energy. More importantly, organisms are definitely not solids but
liquid crystalline, consisting of 70% by weight of water, which is increasingly
recognized by scientists in the mainstream as the most important constituent of
living systems. (An entire Royal Society discussion meeting was recently
devoted to the question: is life possible without water?) The large amounts of
water associated with living organisms offer the flexibility that practically
all proteins, DNA, RNA and other macromolecules need in order to work at all,
or to work to the high efficiency required in the organisms.
Nevertheless, the analogy is useful, as solid-state systems do exhibit
DL similar (though not exactly the same) to that emitted by organisms and
cells. Musumeci’s group discovered that the intensity of DL is a function
of the size of the grains, and therefore, of the domains in which the
fine-order physical structure can sustain a band of excited electronic levels
that gives rise to DL. When the grains are reduced to powder, DL disappeared.
The standard explanation for DL in solid-state systems is that the excited
electrons move from their fixed orbits around the nucleus of the atoms, and
eventually fall back to the ‘ground state’. In the process, some of
the energy of excitation is re-emitted as delayed luminescence, while the rest
is dissipated as heat.
In collaboration with Musumeci’s team, we have shown that DL
disappears, or is reduced to a very low level when the organisation of the cell
is disrupted by homogenisation, or by immersing in an ionic medium that
irreversibly fragments the cytoskeleton (skeleton of the cell made of special
fibre-forming proteins).
Similarly, using slices of the isolated beef Achilles tendon, we were
able to show that DL is closely dependent on the structure of the collagen
fibrils and the associated biological water. As the water content decreases,
drastic changes take place both in the intensity of the DL and in its rate of
decay (slope of the hyperbolic decay curve).
After-glow and the coherence of organisms
In the cell, as in the solid-state system, excitation energy can make
electrons or even protons (positively charged hydrogen nucleus) move through
the system, and there are many other ways in which the excitation energy can be
stored transiently, before it is dissipated, as heat or light: vibrations of
chemical bonds, large fluctuations of protein and other macromolecules and
electrical currents through the cells and organisms, to mention but a few.
Intuitively, one can see that the more the cell or organism has the capacity to
store the energy, the less will be re-emitted, and also the more long-lasting
is the DL (the slope of the hyperbolic decay curve is less steep). That may be
why there is an inverse relationship between the vigour of seeds and intensity
of DL. But that is no more than a hypothesis at the moment.
It is clear that a lot more research on non-destructive physical methods
is needed. An imaging technique, Symchromics©, invented in my laboratory
allows us to see all living organisms in brilliant colours, and offers the
possibility of measuring the coherence of the organism and cells directly.
The colours depend on the motions of the molecules in tissues and cells
being highly coherent. Because light vibrates much faster than the
coherent motion of the molecules, living organisms look as if they are made of
statically aligned liquid crystals, thereby generating the same kind of
‘interference colours’ that are produced by rock crystals.
Indeed, the intensity of the colours is directly dependent on the
coherence of the molecular motions. Significantly, the most active parts of the
organism are invariably the brightest parts; which suggests that coherence is a
function of the energetic status or vitality of the organism. The colours fade
and disappear as the organism dies, which is when random molecular motions take
over.
What does coherence amount to in the organism in terms of energy storage
and mobilisation? It amounts to energy being mobilised and distributed
throughout the system most rapidly and efficiently, the energy effectively
remaining stored as it is mobilised (see "Why are organisms so complex?" this
issue). When such a system is perturbed with an external light pulse, its
degree of coherence is bound to affect how the energy in the light pulse
excites the system, and how that energy is re-emitted as after-glow.
It would be simple and revealing to correlate DL measurements with
measurements on coherence using Symchromics©. We fully intend to do that
when we can get the funding required.
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