Salento Honey (Apulia, South-East Italy): A Preliminary Characterization by 1H-NMR Metabolomic Fingerprinting

Honey is a natural sweet substance produced by honeybees from the nectar of flowers, plant secretions or plant-sucking insect excretions. Sugars and water constitute the major components, other minor components characterize the organoleptic and nutritional properties. To date, Salento (Apulia region, Italy) honey production is considerably threatened due to the suggested use of neonicotinoids in order to control the insect-vectored bacterium Xylella fastidiosa (subsp. pauca). Metabolomics based on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy was used to describe, for the first time, the composition of honey samples from different Salento producers. Exploratory Principal Component Analysis (PCA) showed, among the observed clustering, a separation between light and dark honeys and a discrimination according to producers, both further analyzed by supervised multivariate analysis. According to the obtained data, although limited to small-scale emerging production, Salento honey shows at the molecular level, a range of specific characteristic features analogous to those exhibited by similar products originating elsewhere and appreciated by consumers. The impact on this production should therefore be carefully considered when suggesting extensive use of pesticides in the area.

Isolation, Detection and Characterization of Aerobic Bacteria from Honey Samples of Bangladesh

Honey is a sweet substance made from the nectar of flowers and other chemical secretions from the bees’ bodies who collect nectar from the flowers and bring it to their hives to transform it to the thick, golden and sweet liquid that we call honey. The benefits of honey are not just limited to its basic use as a natural sweetener, but also its medicinal properties. The purpose of this study was to identify the bacteria that are present in honey commonly found in Bangladesh, which can tolerate the antimicrobial conditions of honey and survive in it. Fortunately, such bacteria could be detected, isolated and characterized by morphological and biochemical tests. The predominant type of bacteria commonly found in both raw and commercial honeys of Bangladesh are gram positive cocci such as streptococci, staphylococci, micrococci, bacilli and lactobacilli. Few gram negative bacteria were also isolated like Escherichia coli (8%) and Klebsiella pneumonia (8%) and some gram negative/gram variable Micrococcus luteus (75%). Hopefully, such knowledge would benefit people in the future as they will know more about the microorganisms present in honey and about the safety and quality of the honey they are about to buy or consume.

Diabetes mellitus: present by historical perspective

Diabetes mellitus has been known from antic period, due to the sweet taste of the urine of this patients. The modern era of diabetes started in 1815 with the discovery made by the French chemist Eugène Chevreul, who found that the sweet substance from the diabetic urine was the same with the grapes sugar. At this point, the study of diabetes has had aproached several succesive objectivs: the development of chemical methods from determination of urinary and blood glucose and its physiological signification (A. Bouchardat, Claude Bernard); the discovery of the organ involved in diabetes (E. Lancereaux, P. Langerhans, von Mering and Minkowsky, E. Laguèsse); indirectly demonstration of the presence of a pancreatic antidiabetic substance, produced possible in the Langerhans islets (E. Hédon, E. Gley, G.L. Zuelzer), the discovery of antidiabetic hormone and full description of its metabolic functions (N.C. Paulescu); purification of the pancreatic extract by J. B. Collip and it’s utilization in diabetes treatment by J. MacLeod, F.G. Banting and C.H. Best; in an unprecedental hurry, the 1923 Nobel Prize for the physiological and experimental discovery of insulin (in fact made by Paulescu) and for its clinical application (in fact due to the purification of the pancreatic extract made by J. B. Collip), without factual reasons the Nobel Prize was awarded to Banting and MacLeod.