Recent Agricultural Research

    There is a very recent article that has to do with L. mesenteroides. The article is an agricultural research article about how L. mesenteroides  is decreasing the amount of sugar that can be taken from sugar cane. It goes on to talk about how L. mesenteroides attacks the sugar cane and enters it through small cracks and fissures in the stalks. It feeds on the simple sugars that are in the sugar cane itself, and changes the sugars into large clunky compounds that are very different from sucrose. One of the byproducts of this feeding is dextran, a vicous polysaccharide that makes it very hard for the people that process the sugar cane. The more dextran there is in the cane, the less sucrose there is to turn into sugar. Thats why its hard on the processors. You can see the entire articles by clicking here:

http://sks.sirs.com/cgi-bin/hst-article-display?id=STX11705-0-1000&artno=0000257163&type=ART&shfilter=U&key=mesenteroides&res=Y&ren=Y&gov=Y&lnk=Y&ic=N

Interesting Facts

• Leuconostos Mesenteroides is the number one cause of sugar cane deterioration in the entire world!
• Leuconostos Mesenteroides if left in a good enviroment for growing can multiply by 10^8 in just a week, thats 1,000,000,000 new bacterium cells
• Dextran a byproduct of Leuconostos Mesenteroides causes headaches that affect processors in sugar cane factories
• Lmesenteroides is used in the pickling of cucumbers