【アホタリアンの主張9】
アホタリアン「海藻を消化できるかどうかで日本人を定義できる！」

ぼく「できませ〜ん、よく読んでみ？」
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Mirjam Czjzek didn't set out to compare cross-cultural eating habits. Instead, the chemist at the Station Biologique de Roscoff, on the coast of Brittany in France, was interested in what it takes to digest a piece of seaweed.
Unlike in land plants, the carbohydrates that make up seaweed are spangled with molecules of sulfur, so special enzymes are needed to break them down.
To figure out exactly which enzymes are necessary,Czjzek and colleagues embarked on what she calls "treasure-hunting in the marine bacterial genome.
" The researchers focused onZobellia galactanivorans, a marine bacterium known to munch on seaweed.
The hunt turned up five genes inZ. galactanivoransthat seemed to code for enzymes that could break down the particular carbohydrates found in the marine algae.
When the researchers transferred these genes to another bacterium forced to eat seaweed carbohydrates, they found that two genes were particularly active. Czjzek wondered where else these genes might be lurking.
So she used a computational method known as BLAST to scan vast banks of metagenomic data the genomes of bacteria gathered from the environment for sequences that matched up with the twoZ. galactanivoransgenes.
That's when the surprise came. "They were all, except one, from marine bacteria," Czjzek says. "The one exception ... came from human gut samples.
" The bacterium in question is known asBacteroides plebeius, and it has been found only in Japanese people.
Wondering whether the enzymes were unique to Japanese individuals, Czjzek's team compared the microbial genomes of 13 Japanese people with those of 18 North Americans.
Five of the Japanese subjects harbored the enzyme, but among the North Americans, "we didn't find a single one," says Czjzek, whose team reports its findings tomorrow inNature.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2010/04/japanese-guts-are-made-sushi

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