FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Canada Is Finally Stepping Up Its Maple Syrup Research Game

In the right hands, a bottle of maple syrup is a library of novel, naturally synthesized drugs just waiting to be tested.

2015 was a banner year for maple syrup research in Canada. You might expect that to be the case every year for a country that produced 9.49 million gallons of the stuff in 2014. But despite being far and away the largest commercial producer in the world, Canada has actually been quite slow to branch out and explore the untapped research potential of its beloved tree-based condiment.

Rather, the most recent big steps in syrup-based medical research have happened in places such as Rhode Island—which doesn't even produce an appreciable amount of maple syrup. It was there in 2013 and 2014 that researchers from the University of Rhode Island showed that specific phenolic compounds isolated from maple trees successfully slowed the growth of some lab-grown cancer cells, and that a complex extract of phenolic compounds from maple syrup had anti-inflammatory effects in cell cultures.

Advertisement

Seems like a bit of an overachievement for boiled sap, you might say. But screening compounds from the natural world has always been the safest bet for drug discovery. And maple syrup extracts are rich in polyphenols, reactive compounds that maple researchers credit with producing a variety of medicinal effects.

In the right hands, a bottle of maple syrup is a library of novel, naturally synthesized drugs just waiting to be tested. And this was the year Canada really got in on the sweet, medicinal action.

A study at the University of Toronto, published in September, showed that maple syrup extracts may help reduce the deadly protein aggregation found in Alzheimer's. Researchers at McGill University showed in March that a maple syrup extract made a variety of pathogenic bacteria more susceptible to antibiotics, and reduced their ability to aggregate together into resilient communities known as biofilms.

There were also a pair of additional studies—another on the anti-inflammatory properties of phenolic compounds awaiting publication, and one on how sap helped return the gut bacteria of mice to baseline levels after the administration of antibiotics—bringing the total number of papers to four.

I asked Dr. Nathalie Tufenkji from the McGill team how she ended up working with syrup extracts. It was mainly a case, she said, of the right tip at the right time: Dr. Tufenkji works on the antibacterial properties of cranberry extracts, and at a conference at Ocean Spray headquarters (cranberry research is awash in corporate funding) someone mentioned the potential of maple syrup.

Advertisement

She had a system to extract compounds from food and test them on common pathogenic bacteria; the local market had maple syrup. "We figured we'd try it out. We didn't know if anyone had looked at the antibiotic properties," she said.

The syrup extract delivered, disrupting the systems bacteria use to protect themselves from antibiotics, and reducing the amount of antibiotics required to slow their growth. This means there's a whole new research avenue for the extracts in microbiology, where stalled drug development has scientists scrambling for ways to use less antibiotics.

It's the kind of innovative work that's needed to keep Canada at the top of the Maple syrup game. It's a small field, for now, but that just means there's room for competition. Newcomer Japan produced very solid results this year on the anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer effects of syrup extracts—again, from a place that doesn't actually produce any syrup, or even have sugar maple trees.

It probably doesn't matter which country produces the most ground-breaking results in any given field, a competition I likely dreamed up on a late-night Google-scholar binge. After all, studies show that there's been a persistent trend toward more international collaboration in science, and that the most important papers these days, measured by citations, are those that feature contributions from research teams in multiple countries.

Advertisement

Still, with millions of gallons of the stuff making its way down down from the northern forests every year you'd think it'd find its way to the lab bench more often. And while science should strive to be as objective as possible, it can't completely escape the influence of culture: Japan, in addition to their recent maple foray, remains a world leader in green tea research.

Dr. Tufenkji even admits that nationality may have played a factor in her work. "I grew up in Canada, in Montreal. I've always been fascinated with Native American culture. You learn about how they used things like maple products," she told me. "It's something I thought about since I was a little kid. It's funny, how life comes full circle."

Plus in the highly competitive scientific funding arena, Canada's enormous maple syrup industry could make a big difference for the home team. Dr. Tufenkji says she's recently met with the Maple Syrup Producers of Quebec about her research. If they put Ocean Spray levels of money into Canadian maple projects, it may be that local scientists end up with an advantage after all.

In that case you could see Canada making a name for itself in this space again in 2016, unless Japan has a maple-money plan of its own. None of their researchers returned Motherboard Canada's requests for interview.

Correction, Dec. 18: A previous version of this article stated that Canada produced 9.49 million litres of maple syrup in 2014. Rather, Canada produced 9.49 million gallons. Motherboard regrets the error.