Caffeine and adenosine are like brothers from another mother. |
But that’s
not all. Caffeine also ramps up adrenaline production, which increases your
heart and breathing rates, and primes your brain and muscles for action. You
feel a boost from coffee because the caffeine blocks the signal to sleep and fools
your body into thinking it is under attack.
How much
coffee can people safely consume? According to the FDA, 400 mg (4 cups of
brewed coffee) per day appears to be safe for most healthy adults. While it is
estimated to take about 140 cups (8 oz size) of coffee to kill, you can get there a lot quicker with
pure caffeine powder. A single tablespoon can be lethal, prompting the FDA to issue this warning to consumers.
But there
is a creature on Earth that can tolerate much, much more. In fact, it eats
coffee beans for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. And everything in-between.
Amazingly, the coffee berry borer eats nothing but coffee beans!
The coffee berry borer is a small but devastating beetle that lays waste to coffee crops. It subsists solely on coffee, capable of drinking any Starbucks junkie under the table. |
Scientists
have recently discovered how the coffee berry pest can tolerate toxic levels of
caffeine. Do they possess a special gene that can detoxify caffeine? Do they
have receptors that don’t bind caffeine? No…evidently, the answer does not lie
in the genome of the beetle, but in its gut.
To further
test this hypothesis, researchers gave the beetles antibiotics to deplete their
intestinal microbiome. Beetles without their gut bacteria lost the ability to
break down caffeine. When fed some P.
fulva before their coffee bean diet, the beetles excreted no caffeine,
indicating that they were able to detoxify it once again.
Assuming no adverse effects, ingestion of P. fulva might help humans break down caffeine. A better alternative to decaf? |
From an
evolutionary perspective, the study serves as an example of how organisms can
adapt to a new niche without genetic modification. By acquiring specific types
of bacterial symbionts, the coffee berry borer is uniquely able to live off
nothing but coffee.
In the
video below, you can learn more about this research and similar studies being
performed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory:
Contributed
by: Bill Sullivan
Follow Bill on Twitter.Ceja-Navarro, J., Vega, F., Karaoz, U., Hao, Z., Jenkins, S., Lim, H., Kosina, P., Infante, F., Northen, T., & Brodie, E. (2015). Gut microbiota mediate caffeine detoxification in the primary insect pest of coffee Nature Communications, 6 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8618
No comments:
Post a Comment