Emory chemists develop bacteria that may help decaffeinate coffee

[Health India]: Washington, Oct 9 (ANI) : Emory University chemists have suceeded in harnessing the ability of bacteria to make new molecules, which could eventually lead to the creation of naturally decaffeinated coffee plants and produe theophylline , a producte used in treating asthma.

Emory chemist Justin Gallivan and graduate student Shawn Desai, studied coupled the life of a bacterium to the presence of theophylline, a compound that is used to treat asthma, and is produced by the breakdown of caffeine in both coffee and tea plants.

"We know that there is an enzyme that breaks caffeine down into theophylline, but we don't know much about it.What we do know is that it works very slowly. Ideally, we would like to speed it up a bit so that we could create coffee plants that are low in caffeine. That's where the bacteria come in. They now need the breakdown product of the enzyme (theophylline) for survival, but they can't do much with caffeine," Gallivan, an assistant professor of chemistry, said.

Gallivan said that their idea is to supply the bacteria with caffeine, and give each bacterium a piece of DNA from coffee plants that may encode the enzyme to would allow the bacterium to convert the caffeine to the theophylline,which it also needs to survive.

More...