Vitamins from bacteria
This is a tangent that popped into my head that could be a viable project for us due to it's simplicity. Concept is simple. Modify readily availiable probiotic bacteria to contain genes that allow them to produce the vitamins that we currently have to ingest. They would have to be able to break down and process our waste and turn it into vitamins. This is already done for vitamin k (i think, this is off memory, but i know one of our vitamins comes from out gut). So why not all the rest? no more supplements and it could even work as a treatment for those deficient in one vitamin or another. Hell we could even have one produce massive amounts of vitamin A1 from glims and cassox vision trial. Sure it won't give you super vision but it could be interesting to see what your body does with more of it than usual. Possibilities are endless. So thorugh out some ideas and lets get tinkering. I should mention as the lab gets built and funded and such, if any of the ideas put forth in this thread are interesting or well put together I will actually make the bacteria and could run trials with them. SO lets do this!
Comments
Evidence of cellulose metabolism by the giant panda gut microbiome
Since vitamin A was discussed earlier, @Rubix was attempting this back in 2013 but got distracted, possibly due the roadblocks discussed earlier. Here were his notes in case those roadblocks are overcome in the future: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jtLCrmNA7pTTQTuvkYWxokUco8_-WVm7b0ZQBR7M-FA/edit?usp=sharing
Vitamin B12 would be a good fit, in terms of solubility and toxicity (It's been used safely in doses up to and possibly greater than 140 mg/kg intravenously.) In addition, there are already bacteria which produce a certain form of it (Hydroxocobalamin - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxocobalamin). I figure that having a look at the bacteria used for this process would probably be extremely useful.
And here's a presumably lovely article(behind the ever requisite extravagant pay-wall) on the topic: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11935176
@glims Could you grab this one, if you have access to it?
Further research yielded this article(jn.nutrition.org/content/41/4/555.full.pdf), which basically yielded the name of one of the bacterium used for commercial and industrial production of vitamin B12 for use in supplements, Bacillus megaterium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_megaterium). Another bacterium more specifically designed to produce B12 is Pseudomonas denitrificans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudomonas_denitrificans).
However, since bacteria in the human gut already produce small amounts of vitamin B12, why reinvent the wheel in regards to this vitamin, unless producing elevated levels of B12 is a good thing (because it's got some interesting properties and uses, like treating cyanide poisoning in addition to the energy boosting properties it's most famous for). Also, since vitamin B12 is the most complex of the vitamins, it can't be that difficult to engineer other bacteria that produce simpler Vitamins.