Penicillium mould contains large quantities of chitin, the polysaccharide
that is the major structural component of fungal cell walls. Spent cultures of
the mould are often simply thrown away. However, Biochemie, of Kundl in Austria,
a subsidiary of Swiss drugs giant Novartis and one of the world’s major
producers of penicillin, markets its waste in four forms as a fertiliser. One of
the fertilisers, Biosol, comes as pellets containing extra potassium
sulphate.

When Cohen added these pellets to soil until they made up one per cent by
weight, he found that they suppressed the pathogenic fungi that attack plants’
roots. “Soil-borne diseases, such as Fusarium, which attacks melons,
are a major agricultural problem, especially in monocultures,” says Cohen. The
problem is all the more acute because methyl bromide, the major treatment for
these diseases, is being phased out in industrial countries because it destroys
the ozone layer.

Cohen suspected that chitinolytic fungi in the pellets were acting on soil
pathogens. Unlike most other fungi, these species can digest chitin. To test his
theory, Cohen took soil treated with Biosol and placed it in a growth medium of
chitin. Fungi quickly appeared in his Petri dishes even though they are normally
extremely difficult to culture from samples of soil that has been used for
cultivation, Cohen says.

Cohen’s next step will be to isolate the varieties of chitinolytic fungi
involved and prove that they actively suppress the pathogens. If his hypothesis
is correct, chitin-based fertilisers could prove to be a valuable new weapon for
vegetable and fruit growers—even for organic farmers who reject chemical
fertilisers. Biosol has already been approved for use by organic farming
associations in California and the European Union.

After experimenting with different root stocks, Ben-Ami Bravdo of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem’s Faculty of Agriculture in Rehovot found that a type
called Ruggeri was able to grow in saline water, without passing on too much
salt to the fruit.

He then grafted different grape varieties onto the root stock and tested
their juice and the wine for both sugar content and for the more volatile
compounds that give wine its aroma.

He found that a large number of these compounds appeared in considerably
higher quantities in this wine than in conventional wines made from grapes grown
in freshwater. But a strong aroma does not necessarily mean that the vine is
producing more of the volatile compounds, he says.

Some of the compounds are attached to sugar molecules, while others are free.
Only the free molecules can evaporate and so contribute to the wine’s
distinctive nose. Increasing the amount of salt in the grapes, says Bravdo,
tends to convert fixed volatile compounds into free ones and thus create a
stronger aroma.

Bravdo’s findings have already been taken up enthusiastically by vintners in
the Negev. While the area gets little rainfall, it has a large reserve of
groundwater—enough, Bravdo says, for more than 200 years of intensive
agriculture in the region. However, the groundwater is moderately saline.
Salinity is often measured by its electrical conductivity, which rises as the
salt content increases. The groundwater in the Negev is up to 3 decisiemens per
metre, compared with about 50 decisiemens per metre for seawater.

Bravdo has successfully grown vines where the salinity of the water is up to
4 decisiemens per metre. But he finds that a salinity of 2 decisiemens per metre
produces the best quality wine, as well as the highest yield. So the wine
producers in the Negev Desert will still need to dilute the brackish water with
freshwater, he says.

Even after the expense of piping freshwater into the Negev, the vineyards
will still be an economic—and even lucrative—way of using the
desert’s land and groundwater, says Bravdo.

The first small commercial vintage of red and white wines from the Negev,
made from the 1998 crop, is now being sold in Israel. Lewis Pesko, a winemaker
at Tishbi Estates Wineries in Binyamina, Israel, says that he has had “excellent
results” from the grapes. But he added that other factors, such as the Negev’s
arid climate, could also be contributing to the quality of the wine.

AT LEAST one of the four Australian athletes who died after a bridge
collapsed at the “Jewish Olympics” in Israel last month may have been poisoned
by chemicals in the Yarkon River, according to doctors who treated some of the
victims. Several others were treated in hospital for lung damage due to
poisoning.

About a hundred members of the Australian team were thrown from the bridge
into the river at the opening of the Maccabiah Games in Ramat Gan, a suburb of
Tel Aviv. Two of them, Gregory Small and Yetti Bennet, died soon afterwards,
while the third, Elizabeth Sawicki, died in hospital 12 days later. The fourth,
Walter Zines, died this week.

The deaths were thought to have been caused by water in the victims’ lungs.
But Amiram Lev, director of the respiratory and paediatric intensive care unit
at Ha-Emek Hospital in Afula in northern Israel, who treated Sawicki, says that
the accumulation of fluid in her lung tissue was much more serious than would
have been caused by the water alone. There was also damage to her heart muscle.
Her symptoms, he says, indicate that she was exposed to an unknown toxic
substance.

Yoel Margalit, director of the Centre for Biological Control at Ben-Gurion
University in Be’ersheva, claimed last week that the athletes who died were
poisoned by an insecticide called MLO, a petroleum product that is sprayed on
rivers to kill mosquito larvae. He claims that the day before the disaster, the
river was sprayed with quantities of MLO six times as high as the recommended
level.

But Nehama Ronen, director-general of the environment ministry, says Margalit
is frightening the public unnecessarily. She says her ministry is considering
legal action. Other officials point out that MLO has been in use for years in
Israel and elsewhere. They say it is harmless.

But other doctors have joined Lev in claiming that the Australians were
poisoned, although none has suggested what the toxic agent may have been.
Patrick Sorkin, director of the intensive care unit at Ichelov Hospital in Tel
Aviv, where many of the injured were treated, says some showed clear evidence of
hydrocarbon poisoning, perhaps from oil in the river. He suggests that there may
have been some other substance that intensified the effect of the
hydrocarbons.

Experts from the environment ministry say that industrial and agricultural
pollutants that accumulated in the mud over many years may have been stirred up
when the bridge collapsed. The ministry is waiting for the results of tests for
organic compounds and bacteria in the river.

Chanan Dimentman, a hydrobiologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
says: “The real problem is the pollution of a river that flows through a heavily
populated region.”

GREEN organisations will no longer have free run of Israel’s environment
ministry, says its new director-general, Nehama Ronen. While she wants good
relations with environmentalists, she says, it is “completely unacceptable” for
them to be directly involved in the ministry’s decision making, as they were
under the previous administration.

In recent weeks environmental groups have attacked the ministry for reversing
previous decisions on two of the most prominent ecological issues facing the
Israeli government. The ministry has announced that it will allow the
construction of 300 houses on the site of the Hula wetlands reclamation project
in Upper Galilee. It has also dropped its objections to the expansion of the
country’s international airport, which is located in a heavily populated area
west of Tel Aviv.

When the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to
power in June, Rafael Eitan replaced Yossi Sarid at the environment ministry.
Eitan is also agriculture minister. Sarid, who heads the green, left-wing Meretz
party, developed unusually close relations with the major green groups, which
were intimately involved in almost every aspect of the ministry’s work.

Ronen argues that such relations are neither proper nor healthy for the
greens. “In most countries,” she says, “the greens are in constant contention
with their ministries of the environment.” Environmental organisations, she
says, should represent environmental interests and nothing else. Being involved
in the formulation of policy compromises the greens, Ronen maintains.

Israel’s greens disagree. “We’ve got access to information and professional
abilities that the ministry doesn’t have, so a dialogue is a positive thing,”
argues Samuel Chayen, spokesman for the Israel Union for Environmental
Defense.

Eitan Gdalizon, director-general of the Society for the Protection of Nature
in Israel, says that the new decisions on the Hula wetlands and the airport
contradict the recommendations of the ministry’s own staff. Gdalizon says the
ministry’s studies on the airport recommended further study “on the grounds that
the development involved is far beyond the capacity of the local environment to
absorb it. Decisions like that are warning signals about the ministry’s
Čč±è±è°ùŽÇČ賊łó.”

The greens say that there is a conflict of interest in the combined
agriculture and environment portfolios. But Ronen argues that by sharing a
minister the staff of the two ministries will be able to solve many problems
together. When the two ministries are headed by separate ministers, she claims,
conflicts must be solved at a political level, where environmental interests
usually lose out.

The Greens reject her argument. “The Ministry of the Environment’s job is not
to find compromises. It is to represent the interests of the environment in the
government,” says Gdalizon.

FOREIGN archaeologists working in Israel are so bad at returning
artefacts they have “borrowed” for study that the government has decided
to stop
the flood of material out of the country.

The Israel Antiquities Authority has told archaeologists that the days when
they could get a licence to ship home just about anything they found are over.
According to Pnina Shor, the authority’s head of artefact treatment and
conservation, about 80 per cent of the items taken out of the country have not
been returned on time, and in many cases not at all.

Faced with this steady loss of its archaeological treasures, the authority
has decided to enforce a clause in the country’s antiquities law that has
remained dormant until now. Under this clause, archaeologists are allowed to
remove finds only for some compelling reason—to perform laboratory tests
that can’t be done in Israel for example. Shor says this brings Israel
into line
with countries such as Cyprus and South Africa.

Many of the major excavations being carried out in Israel today are run by
foreign researchers, mostly American, who spend half their summer each year
digging on an Israeli hilltop with the help of student volunteers. Most say the
ruling will put up their costs and discourage them from working there.

“I understand the problem. I am as concerned as they are and applaud their
efforts to get material back. My question is whether this is the best way to go
about it,” says Seymour Gittin, director of the W. F. Albright Institute of
Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. “I think it will be counterproductive.
It’s not feasible economically to do all the analysis in Israel. People simply
won’t come to dig here.”

Eric Meyers of Duke University in North Carolina, who recently returned from
his latest dig at Seforis in Galilee, says he is struggling to find enough
money
to send colleagues to Israel to analyse this year’s material. Meyers has
hundreds of thousands of animal bones stored in Jerusalem and says he must now
fly out a palaeobiologist familiar with the work to study them.

Not all archaeologists object to the ruling. Richard Freund of the
University
of Nebraska at Omaha, who excavated this summer at Bethsaida, says that sending
material overseas increases the risk of contamination. He also disagrees with
those who complain that it increases costs. It can be cheaper to have the work
done in Israel, where, he says, “you can get top-notch experts to work on your
łŸČčłÙ±đ°ùŸ±Čč±ô”.

Shor says that the change in the rules has already encouraged an unusual
degree of punctuality among archaeologists. “As soon as we announced the new
policy, material began returning. If we see that things are returning, we’ll be
easier about letting material out,” she says.

The organism in question is the bacterium Haloarcula marismortui, one of only two species of bacteria that live in the Dead Sea. The researchers focused on ferredoxin, a protein that helps transfer electrons in the cell’s energy-producing processes. Haloarcula‘s ferredoxin stays in solution, the researchers suggest, by gaining as much negative charge as it can without disturbing its essential structure.

Felix Frolow at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Moshe Mevarech of Tel Aviv University and Menachem Shoham of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, analysed the protein’s structure and report their results in Nature Structural Biology (). They point out that for a protein to function in a supersaturated salt environment, it has to compete successfully with salt and other inorganic molecules for available water in order to stay in solution in the cytoplasm. If it precipitates it becomes useless.

Using X-ray crystallography, the researchers found that the surface of Haloarcula‘s ferredoxin is more negatively charged than that of any other protein known to molecular biologists. It also carries an extra appendage-which equivalent ferredoxin proteins found in other bacteria and plants do not have-with an equally strong negative charge. This increases the molecule’s surface area. The net effect is to attract water molecules, which shield the protein from the harsh environment in which the bacterium lives.