Cassava cyanocarbohydrate metabolism and proposed prehistoric symbionts

Abstract

Plant/animal symbiosis produces interacting plant food parts that bear selective pressure to produce specific behaviors that aid the plant’s reproduction and/or survival. The cassava plant is here proposed to have created such a transactional food part in the cyanogenic carbohydrate tubers that acts through a sirtuin-activating pathway. The effect of exclusive cassava cyanocarbohydrate metabolism at the cellular level is to utilize the methylglyoxal bypass of glycolysis. In doing so, deleterious triose-phosphate generated methylglyoxal is dismutated to metabolites necessary for simultaneous glycolysis (inorganic phosphate and NAD). That steady high rate of NAD supply drives gradual systemic sirtuin-activation on an exclusive cassava root diet as it progresses over 1 to 7 days. Clearing the large intestine of other foods (circa 5 to 7 days) correlated with maximal expression of the Sirt1 gene dependant increased physical activity phenotype in personal testing. A rational for such a mechanism is that proposed which involves prehistoric symbionts that coevolved with the cassava plant up until the megafauna extinctions 10,000 years ago. Key words: Cyanogenic glucosides, methylglyoxal dismutation, cassava, symbionts, sirtuin Sirt1, colon microflora, pectin.