Bacteria in a sewage treatment plant produce vitamin B12, explaining how biotechnology can efficiently provide us with an important vitamin.
Sewage treatment plants conjure up images of dirt and bad odors, while vitamins conjure up images of health, so it’s hard to think of any connection between them. The two are so different that people would find it hard to believe that bacteria living in sewage treatment plants could be used to make vitamins. Surprisingly, however, when it comes to vitamin B12, all companies use only bacteria to make it. How is this possible, especially since we’ve been taught that germs like bacteria make toxic substances that make us sick?
Vitamin B12 plays an important role in our health. It’s essential for the functioning of the nervous system, DNA synthesis, and the formation of red blood cells. Therefore, a deficiency can lead to a variety of health problems, such as anemia, nerve damage, fatigue, and memory loss. Understanding how bacteria can make such an important vitamin is even more intriguing.
So why have pharmaceutical companies turned to bacteria to make vitamins? The reasons are clear. It would be too expensive to synthesize vitamin B12 in a lab. Vitamin B12 has a complex molecular structure and requires many steps to synthesize. This economic problem led pharmaceutical companies to use bacteria to produce the vitamin.
Obtaining vitamin B12 from bacteria is both simple and challenging. If bacteria only produced vitamin B12 without producing toxic substances, there would be no problem. But bacteria are living things, not robots, and it’s hard to make them do what you want. Biological engineers have solved this problem in a simple way.
To understand how biological engineers solved the problem, we first need to understand what happens in our bodies and in small bacteria. The instructions for many biological phenomena that happen automatically in our bodies are encoded in a huge encyclopedia called DNA, encoded in four symbols. For example, when we need to make a protein, we only copy the instructions for protein synthesis from DNA, which is called RNA. This copy is then decoded by the ribosomes, the protein synthesis machinery in the cell, to make the protein and utilize it in the body. Bacteria that can make vitamin B12 also store information about how to make toxins and how to make vitamin B12.
What happens if you remove the part of the instructions that makes toxins? The bacteria would no longer be able to make toxic substances. With this in mind, the first thing biotechnologists do is cut out this part of the DNA to prevent the bacteria from producing the toxic substance.
Will this allow us to mass produce as many vitamins as we want? The answer is no. Every organism is designed to make only as much of a substance as it needs, so if you set up a factory to make sure it doesn’t make toxic substances, the factory owner would soon close its doors after seeing very little vitamin B12.
If the factory owner wanted to make more of the product, he would add more machines and hire more workers. The bioengineers manipulate the employment information in the bacteria’s DNA so that ten people work in the bacterial factory when only one employee is needed. As a result, the factory makes a lot of vitamin B12 and stores a surplus.
The final task of the bioengineers comes in the description of the bacteria’s nutrient uptake. The idea was based on the fact that even on a 10-lane highway, if the on-ramp section of the highway is narrow, the overall speed of traffic is terribly slow. Biological engineers have been able to increase the rate at which bacteria take in nutrients, which has the following effects This exponentially increases the number of factories making vitamins and provides enough raw materials for each factory’s machinery to increase vitamin production.
The biotechnology used in this process is an important part of biotechnology and has many applications in the medical, agricultural, and environmental fields. For example, gene editing can be used to increase crop yields or remove toxins from polluted environments. As you can see, biotechnology is making a huge contribution to improving our lives.
In this process, biotechnologists can turn bacteria into vitamin factories to produce the vitamins we want. Modifying DNA to mass-produce desired substances is one of the things that biotechnologists do. With future research and advances, we will be able to produce more supplements and drugs in a more efficient and economical way. Biotechnology is an important field of science that enriches our lives and promises a healthy future.
