Project Results

Hello gracious supporters,

It’s been an unforgivably long time since we last checked in with all of you and we’re quite embarrassed over that. I’m afraid scientific research is a pretty all-consuming enterprise, which chronically detracts us from other important life pursuits, like timely communications. Well, that’s the bad news.

The good news is that the DSU Pumpkin Team has been hard at work over the last year or so developing a suitable method of analysis for profiling the volatile chemicals emitted from sealed preserves that generate the distinct smell and taste sensations of the foods we eat, including decades-old homemade preserves prepared in rural South Dakota.

Recall the ultimate aim of our research was to use modern chemical and microbiological techniques to profile the chemical and biological composition of our much-celebrated preserved pumpkin that landed Moody County SD resident Mrs. Emma Youel a ceremonious second-place prize at the 1920 Moody County Fair (held in Flandreau, SD). However, before opening that only-of-its-kind irreplaceable jar of preserved pumpkin to test it, we first had to spend copious time and effort in the laboratory developing and refining an analytical method from scratch (much like the effort Mrs. Youel had to expend in developing her award-winning pumpkin preserve) and then demonstrating that the method worked effectively on a lot of similar preserved foods. And we spent late 2017 and all of 2018 doing just that (scientific research is a slow and often tedious pursuit).

To facilitate this work, Moody County Museum volunteer (and awesome human) Berdyene Bowen (with help from her wonderful family) permitted us to plunder her turn-of-the-twentieth century basement in search of old preserves (prepared by her mother during the period 1950-1953) on which we could test our newly developed method. After searching through some 150 jars of preserves, we found 31 that had remained perfectly sealed. We spent all of 2018 applying our newly developed method to profiling the volatile aroma chemicals released from these 31 preserves after nearly 70-years of storage. We then compared their aroma profiles to modern store-bought preserves analyzed with our method to see how these preserves differed in aroma composition.

To wrap up a much longer story (and a 2-year investigation), the novelty of this research earned us an invitation to submit a paper to a special issue of the international scientific journal Molecules by January 1, 2019. This was quite a thrill for all the students working on the project, as such invitations for undergraduate research to be published in a special journal issue is unheard of. We submitted the paper on that date and, after addressing the critical feedback provided by several anonymous expert reviewers in a revised manuscript, that paper was just accepted for publication and is attached here for everyone to see.

We’re very proud of this scholarly contribution and it now provides the validated analytical foundation necessary for us to apply this method (and other chemical/biological methods now under development in our lab) to profiling the chemical and biological constituents of the “THE PUMPKIN.” That work is ongoing and being expanded to include some additional chemical tests that will permit us to extract as much information as scientifically possible from this only-of-its-kind sample of preserved pumpkin. So, please stay tuned for more on this.

The Pumpkin Team thanks all our backers for making this novel research and the resulting student-authored paper possible. You can take great pride in knowing that your contributions have directly facilitated the creation of brand-new human knowledge. YES!

HUGE thanks again and we’ll be in touch with the next installment of this fascinating scientific/historical story as soon as possible!

Cheers!



DSU Pumpkin Team