Researchers unveil something that could turn the miracle fruit world on its ear. Find out how fungus, E. coli, and even tomatoes have come to be key players.
For the past several years, Japanese researchers have enlisted the help of fungi, non-virulent forms of E. coli, and field crops in an effort to create bio-production systems to inexpensively yield larger amounts of miraculin, the active ingredient in miracle fruit. The Japanese have been a little bit ahead of the us and the rest of the world when it comes to using miraculin. For instance, miracle fruit extract and miraculin has been tested and approved for sale by Japan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare (comparable to the FDA in the US). Miracle fruit tablets have been on sale in Japan since 2006.
The most promising effort to come to fruition (get it?) has been through tomatoes. Would they be called miracle tomatoes or miracle fruit tomatoes? One of the decisions the researchers are trying to make is whether these tomatoes would be offered as snacks prior to consuming food or if the tomatoes would provide an easier way to mass produce miraculin for use in capsules.
This is pretty exciting news in the world of miracle fruit. Maybe this will be the catalyst that the miracle fruit needs in order to become mass marketed and produced in the US.
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