Originally, they'd been getting the sugar from yeast, but they borrowed enzymes from a soil bacterium to radically reduce the cost of manufacture. From the arti

Originally, they'd been getting the sugar from yeast, but they borrowed enzymes from a soil bacterium to radically reduce the cost of manufacture. From the article: "...making it in large quantities was expensive—about $700 per kilogram. With tinkering, syrup scientists at Japan’s Hayashibara chemistry company finally figured out a novel enzymatic method to make it on the cheap from starch. The method brought costs down to just $3 per kilogram." From the paper linked in the article: "Although its usefulness was recognized, trehalose was not produced on an industrial scale until 1994. The conventional method for production, for example, extraction from yeast, had too low a yield andtoo high a cost to be used. In order to implement industrial production of trehalose, we have researchednew enzyme systems and have succeeded in isolating a novel enzyme system from a bacterial strainbelonging to the genus Arthrobacter sp. Q36 that was obtained from soil [1]. The system has been found to consist of two novel enzymes: malto-oligosyltrehalose synthase (or MTSase) and malto-oligosyltre-halose trehalohydorolase (or MTHase). In the first step, MTSase catalyzes the intramolecular transglycosylation of glucose residue at the reducing end of malto-oligosaccharide from α-1, 4 bond to α-1, 1 bond, then malto-oligosyltrehalose is produced. This contains trehalose residue at the end of the saccharide chain. Next, trehalose is liberated from malto-oligosyltrehalose by MTHase. This pathway needs no high-energy sugar derivative such as sugar phosphate or sugar nucleotide. And those enzymes can repeatedly act on α-1, 4 glucan to produce trehalose up to 80 % yield (Fig. 1). The trehalose production scheme that has been developed in our company is shown in Fig. 2. Starch is liquefied by a thermostable α-amylase and is debranched by isoamylase. The formed amylose is converted into trehalose by this system. The system involves two novel enzymes, MTSase and MTHase, which act on amylose or starch to produce trehalose efficiently. By this process, we have succeeded in reducing the production cost of trehalose to approximately one hundredth of its initial cost. The cost was reduced enough to permit a widespread application to many foods such as sweeteners and stabilizers. In addition, trehalose is also expected to be used for various applications in the fields of medicine and cosmetics."