Vitamin K2 breakthrough could supercharge bone and heart health

A recent study has uncovered how the bacterium Lactococcus lactis, commonly used in dairy fermentation, regulates its production of vitamin K₂ (menaquinone), a vital nutrient for bone health, blood clotting, and cardiovascular function. The microbe naturally produces only enough vitamin K₂ to sustain itself, due to an internal self-limiting mechanism that prevents toxic buildup of an unstable intermediate compound essential to all forms of vitamin K₂. This biological “brake” has posed challenges for efforts to engineer bacteria to overproduce the vitamin for commercial use, which could otherwise offer a greener, cheaper alternative to current chemical synthesis or plant extraction methods. Researchers combined biosensing, genetic engineering, and mathematical modeling to decode these production limits. They developed a highly sensitive biosensor to detect the hard-to-measure vitamin K₂ precursor and discovered that production plateaus when substrate supply is depleted. Additionally, they found that the order of enzyme-encoding genes on DNA influences intermediate compound levels, revealing a previously unknown evolutionary