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Science identifies the ancient enzyme in bacteria that makes humans' body odor so pungent:
Researchers have zeroed in on the source of our stink.
The same team that identified the handful of bacteria responsible for human body odor has now gone a step further and pinpointed the enzyme operating within those organisms. It's a cysteine-thiol lyase (C-T lyase) enzyme within bacteria like Staphylococcus hominis that makes the actual smelly molecules, which have inspired an entire industry of deodorants to contain them.
"This is a key advancement in understanding how body odour works, and will enable the development of targeted inhibitors that stop BO production at source without disrupting the armpit microbiome," said University of York researcher Dr. Michelle Rudden, in a release.
[...] "This research was a real eye-opener," said Unilever co-author Dr. Gordon James. "It was fascinating to discover that a key odor-forming enzyme exists in only a select few armpit bacteria and evolved there tens of millions of years ago."
Journal Reference:
Michelle Rudden, Reyme Herman, Matthew Rose, et al. The molecular basis of thioalcohol production in human body odour [open], Scientific Reports (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-68860-z)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @06:18AM (3 children)
If your armpit microbiome is that smelly then you probably do want to disrupt it as it indicates you're doing something wrong or are out of balance somehow.
From my understanding the 'cleaner' (more meat based) your diet is the less you smell since you'll excrete less waste products through your skin. Meat is nearly fully digested and absorbed whereas plants have a ton of different types of chemicals and processing those into usable elements takes more steps thus leading to more waste products.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday July 29 2020, @04:08PM (1 child)
Vegetarians take note: Meat is indirectly stored plant based food. Just passed through a preprocessor first. (with macro support)
I wonder if BO evolved to make it easier for predator animals to locate prey?
Or maybe BO is to signal to predators to please make another selection and then press ENTER.
BO must be appealing as a mate selection feature or it would seem to be bred out? Yeast based BO would also be bread out.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:08PM
SN ran an article several years ago about BO and mate selection in humans.
(Score: 2) by helel on Wednesday July 29 2020, @11:08PM
The wast products in sweat come from the metallization of nitrogen, found in higher quantities in a meat based diet. Besides there's the (so far as I'm aware) one study done on the relationship between body oder and meat consumption which found non-meat eaters registered as smelling more attractive, more pleasant, and less intense." [nih.gov] The study is laughably small but it does line up with my experiences that all the worst smelling people I know eat meat and lots of it.