What the Japanese have that Americans don’t: a special gut bacteria with a gene that allows them to digest a specific kind of carbohydrate found only in seaweed.
That’s what a group of marine glycobiology researchers in France discovered when they went looking at a marine bacteria called Zobellia galactanivorans.
The researchers, at the National Center for Scientific Research in Roscoff, France, found that the bacteria carries a gene for making a very specialized carbohydrate-digesting enzyme. It can break down a polysaccharide (a class of complex carbohydrates) called porphyran found in the purple algae of the genus Porphyra. We call it laver in English, but in Japan it’s made into sheets of nori, which wrap sushi.
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