An Apple A Day
I was reading the March '09 issue of Popular Mechanics while on the bus to work this morning and one of the shorts at the front of the magazine grabbed my interest. But it had nothing to do with apples. Apparently there's a company in Florida, ONI BioPharma, which has engineered a strain of bacteria that it has named SMaRT. So what, you ask? Well, tooth decay, as you probably know, is caused by bacteria in the mouth gobbling up sugar and excreting lactic acid. That's called lactic acid fermentation , in case you were curious. The acid causes a change in pH which allows calcium to dissolve. Pretty much the same idea as acid rain causing marble statues to erode in Italy---marble being composed primarily of calcium carbonate. So what this new SMaRT bacteria does is out compete the normal bacteria in the mouth. You see, SMaRT bacteria are engineered to not be able to excrete lactic acid. Instead they poop out an antibiotic that targets the bacteria that cause tooth decay. Pret...