Vitamin B12 helps in detoxifying major pollutants

A major breakthrough study has revealed how certain organisms used vitamin B12 to lower the toxicity of pollutants in the environment and this knowledge could be more effective methods for detoxifying dangerous pollutants like PCBs and dioxins.

Professor David Leys and team at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology explained that the most toxic pollutants contained halogen atoms and that most biological systems simply didn't know how to deal with these molecules and that there were some organisms that could remove these halogen atoms using vitamin B12. The research had identified that the organisms used vitamin B12 in a very different way to how they had understood it.

It has taken Professor Leys 15 years of research to reach this breakthrough and the team at the MIB was finally able to obtain key proteins through genetic modification of other, faster growing organisms. They then had used X-ray crystallography to study in 3D how halogen removal was achieved.

Professor Leys said that along with combating the toxicity and longevity of pollutants they were also confident that their findings could help to develop a better method for screening environmental or food samples.

The study has published in Nature.