By Brandon Keim April 7, 2010 | 1:00 pm | Categories: Biology, Food
![](http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2010/04/maki.jpg)
The old adage, “You are what you eat,” has a bacterial component.
In a neat confluence of human history, stomach bacteria and food, researchers have found that the intestinal microbes of Japanese people may be souped up for eating seaweed.
“In a marine bacteria, we identified an enzyme that is very specialized for degrading algal cell walls,” said Mirjam Czjzek, a biologist at France’s Station Biologique de Roscoff. “The only other place we find this enzyme is in the human-gut bacteria of Japanese individuals.”
The discovery, described April 7 in Nature, started with Roscoff biologist Jan-Hendrik Hehemann’s analysis of Zobellia galactanivorans, a common marine bacteria. In it, he found an enzyme that breaks down porphyran, a carbohydrate found in the cell walls of red algae.
The gene that codes for the enzyme has been found in one other place: the genome of Bacteroides plebeius, a microbe found in human intestines. However, not all B. plebeius strains produce the algae-crunching enzyme. It has only been found in Japanese people.
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