An impressively rigorous new study, led by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, is shedding light on a century-old mystery. The study describes how bacteria in the gut can metabolize cholesterol at levels high enough to improve a person’s cardiac health.
For well over 100 years scientists have known some people seem to have an ability to metabolize cholesterol in the gut more effectively than others. A compound called coprostanol was the big clue, and the general hypothesis has been there must be a type of gut microbe that can turn cholesterol into coprostanol.
One of the starting points for the research came from an old study describing the discovery of microbe in a lagoon filled with hog sewage that was found to effectively metabolize cholesterol into coprostanol. So the researchers set out to sequence the entire genome of this cholesterol-consuming hog bacterium with the goal of finding out which particular enzyme is responsible for converting cholesterol into coprostanol.