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When you search on xylitol, use "futile cycle" in the query --essentially, bacteria take xylitol up because it looks enough like a genuine, useful sugar, but ca
by verisimilitude 14y ago
When you search on xylitol, use "futile cycle" in the query --essentially, bacteria take xylitol up because it looks enough like a genuine, useful sugar, but can't do anything metabolically useful with it. It would be like humans spending all our energy chewing wood.
- npsimons 14y agoInteresting. Reminds me a bit of the parts in Greg Egan's "Permutation City" (fiction) where the protagonist is trying to force simulated bacteria to evolve to digest a "sugar" analogue that is poison. Hope our real world bacteria don't evolve to do anything useful with xylitol.