NO week goes by without researchers tracking down new food resources or checking out the health benefits or otherwise of what already exists out there.

An international team of scientists including the University of Adelaide has discovered a new complex carbohydrate in moss that could possibly be exploited for health or other uses.　

Scientists from Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Cell Walls and University of Rhode Island in the USA, may have made a critical breakthrough.

It gets a bit technical from here but they say the polysaccharide in moss looks a bit like the gut-friendly, health-promoting beta glucan found in oats and other cereals.

For those who didn't pay attention in science class, a polysaccharide is a complex carbohydrate made up of sugar molecules.　

Professor Rachel Burton from the University of Adelaide's School of Agriculture, Food and Wine, and Professor Alison Roberts of the University of Rhode Island, were leading research teams looking into the evolutionary history of the beta glucan when they made this discovery.

"What we found was a new polysaccharide made up of the sugars glucose and arabinose, not just glucose as in beta glucan," Professor Burton said.

"We have called it arabinoglucan and believe the way the two different sugars link together will make it structurally similar to beta glucan.

"While we are not advocating eating moss, we are simply saying there is great potential for this new polysaccharide as we've seen with others."

So why all the excitement?

Professor Burton says while the function of the arabinoglucan is not yet known, it may have properties that can be exploited for health, industrial and medical fields.

Just like better known polysaccharides such as cellulose for paper and cotton, or xylans that can be used for as dietary supplements or drug delivery.

"This discovery leads to the question how many other polysaccharides do plants contain that we don't yet know about?

"We don't know what's there because we can't always see it.

"Scientists will need new tools to be able to find them which might include new antibodies and microscopy techniques."