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Editorial 34 Mathematics in vegetable oil Bioinformatics specialists and botanists have made an interesting discovery. The number of theoretically pos- sible fatty acids with the same chain length but of different structure can be determined by means of the famous Fibonacci sequence, and therefore follows the »Golden Section«. This finding can be used in the che- mical analysis of fatty acids – so-called lipidomics – to name but one example. B I O I N F O R M AT I C S BY UTE SCHÖNFELDER Mild in taste and of great nutritio- nal value, the bright yellow vegetable oil pressed from sunflower seeds has many different uses and is extremely healthy as it contains a large proportion of unsaturated fatty acids. This is the term for fatty acids whose hydrocar- bon chains contain one or more double bonds. »As the double bonds can occur in different places in the molecule, fat- ty acids can occur with the same chain length but different structures,« Prof. Dr Stefan Schuster explains. The Pro- fessor of Bioinformatics and his team are driven by the question of whether and how the number of all structural formulas of fatty acids can be calcula- ted for a given chain length so as to be able to use this variable for analytical procedures. And in the process, the Jena-based researchers have recently made an in- teresting discovery. Not only have they been able to prove that the number of fatty acids occurring in nature with rising chain lengths can be elegantly forecast. They also show in an article in »Scientific Reports« that this num- ber obeys the famous Fibonacci se- quence. With this sequence, named af- ter the Italian mathematician Fibonacci (around 1170 to 1240), every number is the sum of the two preceding numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 etc. »In the case of fatty acids, this means that the number of possible fatty acid structures increa- ses with every carbon atom by a factor of roughly 1.618...,« Schuster explains. The longer the chain, the closer the se- quence approaches this factor. While Prof. Dr Stefan Schuster is on the trail of the Fibo- nacci sequence in nature and has now struck lucky with natural fatty acids.