Stripping Down Science (28 page)

Bacteria don't generally have a taste for sushi, but they do degrade seaweeds, so Michel searched the international DNA databases looking to see whether any related genes had been found by other scientists elsewhere. Incredibly, similar gene sequences had been seen before – but not where anyone was expecting: the results he turned up were from bacterial samples collected from human intestines. In this case the organism harbouring them was part of the normal human flora and known as
Bacteroides plebeius
.

More intriguing was that the samples in which these bacteria had been identified were all from Japanese people – the genes appeared to be missing amongst the microbes living in the guts of people in America. This
suggests that the Japanese liking for seaweed (the average daily consumption is 14.2 grams per person) has at some point carried the DNA from a marine bacterium with seaweed-digesting genetic know-how, into the guts of a sushi-eater (or similar), whereupon the resident bacterial flora have grabbed the genes and incorporated them into their own metabolic repertoires.

In this way, the bugs have equipped themselves with the chemical equivalent of a sharper knife and fork to help them to deal with a tough new foodstuff. As Stanford scientist Justin Sonnenburg, commenting on the research, puts it, ‘Next time you take a bite of an unfamiliar food, think about the microbial inhabitants you may be ingesting, and the possibility that you will be providing one of your 10 trillion closest friends with a new set of utensils …'

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