We've had a few conversations about how some pathogens feed off of B12. This is from a convo I had with
@Gondwanaland :
T.B. may steal your B12:
"While this may not entirely ablate B12 biosynthesis [it has been suggested that alternative methyltransferases might partially compensate for the loss of CobF (Rodionov et al.,
2003; Gopinath et al.,
2013a)], it suggests that
M. tuberculosis may have come to rely on the host environment as a source of vitamin" (
Young et. al, 2015).
E. coli steals B12:
"E.coli is thought to be unable to synthesize this vitamin (19a). Typically, bacteria use B12 from the environment" (
Sampson, 1992).
As do some kinds of Yersinia:
"
Y. pseudotuberculosis is vitamin B12 dependent and uptake is known to occur" (
Hinchliffe, 2003).
On the other hand, there are bacteria that produce their own B12 and do not, therefore, have to scavenge it from the host.
As it turns out,
candida also grows better in the presence of B12. That is an article from the 1960s that determined that
By employing wide ranges in vitamin concentrations in biotin basal mineral synthetic medium, it was demonstrated that vitamin B12 markedly stimulated the growth of Candida albicans, the organism showing a partial dependency upon this vitamin. Growth inhibition by 5-fluorouracil was reversed non-competitively by vitamin B12, suggesting that B12 has a role in nucleic acid biosynthesis of the organism.
Old article, but seems to have been performed logically, though
in vitro.
If some sorts of infection sequester B12, that means your own cells don't have enough to do their jobs, which means you need to take more B12, which helps your cells while feeding the infection in question. Talk about your vicious cycles!
-J
