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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

>The Lumina Probiotic aka BCS3-L1 is a genetically modified strain of Streptococcus Mutans that was originally billed as producing ethanol and acetoin instead of lactic acid, outcompeting the wild type upon inoculation and thus dramatically reducing incidence of caries caused by acid buildup on the teeth.

i'm yet to see an alcoholic whose regular "mouth washing" by ethanol leads to good teeth (despite ethanol being very powerful antiseptic) .

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The idea is that the wild-type Streptococcus that already lives in your mouth produces lactic acid, which is bad for your teeth. The modified bacteria produces ethanol instead, which is neutral for your teeth. I don't believe there's any assertion that the ethanol is helpful to your teeth, just that you're going to have some bacterial colony in your mouth, so they are trying to change the byproducts of that colony to something less bad.

According to the article as I understand it, the bacteria in question directly produces formate, the suspected culprit behind the vision loss. Ethanol being produced by the bacteria is not the relevant information here

my point is about selling proposition of that probiotic - production of ethanol which i'd not expect to be long term healthy on its own merits, even without formate.

Various metabolic processes in the body already produce methanol and ethanol. Now as to the relative quantities involved, I have no idea what can be produced by bacteria in the mouth.

Yeah, that is the big question here... how much is being produced. Also, how variable is the product from batch to batch? Could one batch be producing byproducts at much higher quantities than another batch?

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