Probiotics can be engineered to break down acetaldehyde in the gut
If you’re trying to enable the gut microbiome to break down acetaldehyde, the most straightforward approach would be to make a bunch of the same enzyme your liver uses (ALDH) and deliver it to the gut, mimicking exactly what your body already does so effectively. Unfortunately, in this case (and most cases really) we can’t just eat an enzyme to equip our bodies with new traits. Enzymes are proteins, and most proteins you consume will break down very quickly as food in your stomach. Once broken down they lose their function.
But our scientists knew three very interesting things:
- There are probiotic bacteria that can survive the harsh environment of the stomach unharmed.
- Many bacteria are capable of making ALDH – the very enzyme our livers use to break down acetaldehyde.
- We can use genetic engineering to create a probiotic bacteria with the ability to make ALDH!
So rather than trying to solve the problem with an enzyme that won’t survive in the gut, we can instead use genetic engineering to build a probiotic bacteria that not only makes the enzyme but can also deliver it safely to where it's most needed to break down acetaldehyde!
Though the actual building and testing behind our engineered ZB183™ strain took years, here is what we did on a basic level: We started with a natural probiotic bacteria called Bacillus subtilis. Humans have been intentionally consuming B. subtilis as a probiotic in supplements and fermented foods (e.g. natto, kombucha, etc.) for centuries. B. subtilis also has the natural ability to pass through your stomach acid unharmed and make enzymes in your gut (citation). We then used a process naturally honed by bacteria to insert the instructions for making ALDH into the bacteria’s genome, carefully selecting a location that optimizes the expression of this enzyme. The result was ZB183™ – a probiotic strain of B. subtilis that is identical in every way to the one humans already consume, but with one additional trait: the ability to break down acetaldehyde.