By Susan Milius
Eating seaweed appears to give some Japanese people digestive superpowers.
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A paper in the April 8 Nature reports the discovery that bacteria in the guts of some Japanese people can break down porphyran, a compound found in seaweed. People who carry the bacteria may derive some nutritional benefit from the microbes, says coauthor Gurvan Michel, a biochemist at the Biological Station of Roscoff in France who is affiliated with the Pierre and Marie Curie University and the French national research agency CNRS.
The human gut bacteria probably acquired the gene centuries ago from marine microbes hitchhiking through the intestines on the seaweed abundant in the Japanese diet, says Michel.