I had a chance to meet Mr. Ken Hayashibara, the president of Hayashibara Shoji, Inc. in the TV interview show on BS Asahi the other day. You should have heard the name “trehalose”, even if you don’t know what kind of chemical substance it is, since there’s been a TV commercial lately using a cute alien-like mascot.
Trehalose was first succeeded to produce in a laboratory of Hayashibara Shoji 25 years ago. By glycosylating corn and bringing it into contact with two kinds of enzymes, the researchers succeeded to turning the long molecular-structured starch into trehalose as big as two glucoses.
After that, the Hayashibara Laboratory has had many development researches over various application ranges of trehalose. I’d like to talk about trehalose here, as there were many things about trehalose that I didn’t know either.
Trehalose is a natural material, existing in shiitake-mushroom, nameko-mushroom yeast, hijiki (Japanese sea weed), and so on. If you put dried-up, dead-looking selaginella into water for 24 hours, it revives into healthy green selaginella. You will find this vital phenomenon as if the dead return to life.
The component that revives this dried-up selaginella is, trehalose. It’s been found out that trehalose has a strong relationship with body fluid that stays there and never gets dehydrated, like bonding water in cells.
Every one of our cells contains trehalose. As human cells lose their functions if they lose water, trehalose is used to transport human heart or other organs for transplant. It is not just for keeping fluid, but it also has to protect the organ to keep all components of its cells in the original 3D-shape with bonding water, so that DNA and other functioning components in enzymes and cells can keep playing their rolls properly. If a cell loses its fluid, the protein will lose the 3D or spiral structure right away and become like a string, and lose its functions as a cell completely. In other words, if the cell structure is kept 3D, that means the cell contains ??% trehalose, which is the water that maintain life.
*Hayashibara Shoji, Inc.
http://www.hayashibarashoji.jp/
