Thu January 5, 2012 What The Camembert Rind Does For The Cheese
Inside For lovers of Camembert, the downy white rind is the tart
bite that balances out the fat-laden, oozing, pungent layer
inside. For a group of Swiss bioengineers, that moldy rind is
one of nature's greatest living surfaces, doing double duty as a
shield and a cleaner. The rind allows the cheese's deep flavor
and aroma to mature, but also defends it against microorganisms
that could spoil it. The cheese repays the fungi on the rind by
supplying it with nutrients. So amazing is the rind that the
scientists, who are interested in designing "smart," functional
materials, used it as an inspiration to build their own living
material. The researchers describe their work in a paper
published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences. "We were interested in how the fungi claims the
whole cheese for itself," Lukas Gerber, a researcher at the
Institute for Chemical and Bio-Engineering in Zurich and an
author of the paper, tells T