Eating seaweed gives gut a boost

摘要

Eating seaweed appears to give some Japanese people digestive superpowers. Bacteria in the guts of some Japanese people can break down porphyran, a compound in seaweed that is normally indigestible, scientists report in the April 8 Nature. The microbes may provide nutritional benefit to these people, says study coauthor Gurvan Michel, a biochemist at the Biological Station of Roscoff in France. After discovering genes for a pair of porphyran-digesting enzymes in the marine bacterium Zobellia galactaniv-orans, Michel's team searched for simi-lar DNA sequences in other species. The team found a partial match in a gene fromrna human gut bacterium and eventually showed that porphyran-digesting bacteria were in samples from Japanese subjects but not in samples from Westerners.