Seaweed broth

Over 1200 years ago, Asian cooks began adding a type of seaweed found in the Pacific Ocean to their soup stocks. They had discovered that foods cooked in this seaweed broth simply tasted better. What these chefs did not know was that the broth s unique flavour enhancement quality was due to the high levels of naturally occurring glutamate in the seaweed. Finally, in 1908, the link between glutamate and the seaweed was discovered. Professor Kikunae Ikeda, at Tokyo Imperial University, isolated MSG from the seaweed and unlocked the secret of the plant s flavourenhancing properties. 

The German chemist Karl Heinrich Ritthausen (1826-1912) first identified glutamic acid in wheat gluten in 1866, and its chemical structure was first identified in 1890 by the German chemist Wolff. Then in 1908, the Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda (1864-1936) discovered the flavor-enhancing properties of glutamic acid. He found in seaweed broth a... 

Haliangicin 346, a novel p-methoxyacrylate antibiotic with a conjugated tetraene moiety, was isolated from the culture broth of marine myxobacterium, Haliangium luteum The strain was isolated from a seaweed sample collected at a sandy beach in the Miura Peninsula, Kanagawa, Japan. In studies, haliangicin inhibited the growth of a wide... 

Of the 25 microorganisms isolated from C. armata, no domoic acid (less than 1 ppm) was found in any of the cells or culture broths. It appears that none of these is involved in the origin of domoic acid in this seaweed. 

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