Environmentality in biomedicine: microbiome research and the perspectival body

Unveiling the Chemistry of Citrus Peel: Insights into Nutraceutical Potential and Therapeutic Applications

The recent millennium has witnessed a notable shift in consumer focus towards natural products for addressing lifestyle-related disorders, driven by their safety and cost-effectiveness. Nutraceuticals and functional foods play an imperative role by meeting nutritional needs and offering medicinal benefits. With increased scientific knowledge and awareness, the significance of a healthy lifestyle, including diet, in reducing disease risk is widely acknowledged, facilitating access to a diverse and safer diet for longevity. Plant-based foods rich in phytochemicals are increasingly popular and effectively utilized in disease management. Agricultural waste from plant-based foods is being recognized as a valuable source of nutraceuticals for dietary interventions. Citrus peels, known for their diverse flavonoids, are emerging as a promising health-promoting ingredient. Globally, citrus production yields approximately 15 million tons of by-products annually, highlighting the substantial potential for utilizing citrus waste in phyto-therapeutic and nutraceutical applications. Citrus peels are a rich source of flavonoids, with concentrations ranging from 2.5 to 5.5 g/100 g dry weight, depending on the citrus variety. The most abundant flavonoids in citrus peel include hesperidin and naringin, as well as essential oils rich in monoterpenes like limonene. The peel extracts exhibit high antioxidant capacity, with DPPH radical scavenging activities ranging from 70 to 90%, comparable to synthetic antioxidants like BHA and BHT. Additionally, the flavonoids present in citrus peel have been found to have antioxidant properties, which can help reduce oxidative stress by 30% and cardiovascular disease by 25%. Potent anti-inflammatory effects have also been demonstrated, reducing inflammatory markers such as IL-6 and TNF-α by up to 40% in cell culture studies. These findings highlight the potential of citrus peel as a valuable source of nutraceuticals in diet-based therapies.

The evosystem: A centerpiece for evolutionary studies

In this paper, we redefine the target of evolutionary explanations by proposing the "evosystem" as an alternative to populations, lineages and species. Evosystems account for changes in the distribution of heritable variation within individual Darwinian populations (evolution by natural selection, drift, or constructive neutral evolution), but also for changes in the networks of interactions within or between Darwinian populations and changes in the abiotic environment (whether these changes are caused by the organic entities or not). The evosystem can thereby become a centerpiece for a redefined evolutionary science, that is, evolutionary studies, that apprehends through a single framework the variety of evolutionary processes that lie at various scales. To illustrate the importance of this broadened perspective on evolution, we use a case of antimicrobial resistance evolution: the spread of the blaNDM gene family and the related resistance to carbapenem antibiotics observed globally, and show how evolutionary studies can contribute to answering contemporary socially relevant challenges.

Timeless spaces: Field experiments in the physiological study of circadian rhythms, 1938-1963

In the middle of the twentieth century, physiologists interested in human biological rhythms undertook a series of field experiments in natural spaces that they believed could closely approximate conditions of biological timelessness. With the field of rhythms research was still largely on the fringes of the life sciences, natural spaces seemed to offer unique research opportunities beyond what was available to physiologists in laboratory spaces. In particular, subterranean caves and the High Arctic became archetypal 'natural laboratories' for the study of human circadian (daily) rhythms. This paper is explores the field experiments which occurred in these 'timeless spaces'. It considers how scientists understood these natural spaces as suitably 'timeless' for studying circadian rhythms and what their experimental practices can tell us about contemporary physiological notions of biological time, especially its relationship to 'environmentality' (Formosinho et al. in Stud History Philos Sci 91:148-158, 2022). In so doing, this paper adds to a growing literature on the interrelationship of field sites by demonstrating the ways that caves and the Arctic were connected by rhythms scientists. Finally, it will explore how the use of these particular spaces were not just scientific but also political - leveraging growing Cold War anxieties about nuclear fallout and the space race to bring greater prestige and funding to the study of circadian rhythms in its early years.