Chemistry filter: Decaf edition

April 2, 2016 6:42 AM

An idle curiousity question for the Green's resident chemistry boffins: is there a chemical that could break caffeine down into safe and inactive (from the body's perspective) components?

Preferably the chemical itself would be safe to ingest. Then any coffee could become decaf instantly... like beano for coffee :)

posted by duoshao to Science & Nature (2 answers total)

Do not in any way actually do this, but accompanying your coffee with a good swig of a culture of Pseudomonas pud ida may be your best bet. Outsourcing difficult chemistry to bacteria is good!
posted by cromagnon at 12:14 PM on April 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

There is indeed a known microbial caffeine degradation pathway (reviewed in the intro here). Enzymatic degradation is probably a quite safe way to specifically degrade caffeine in food (the output of that pathway is xanthine, which is already present in human tissues). The problem is that this pathway isn't just one enzyme but more like five, some of the enzymes don't seem to be very stable when purified, and some of the steps require cofactors which adds additional expense/complication. It's possible someone could use that pathway as a starting point and engineer something more stable, but it wouldn't be as trivial as Beano (one enzyme, relatively cheap and easy to purify iirc). And since other decaffeination methods are pretty straightforward (e.g. supercritical CO₂), non toxic and "good enough" in quality I'm guessing there wouldn't be a ton of demand for a more finicky enzymatic process, though I'm not in the food industry so maybe I have that wrong.
posted by en forme de poire at 12:43 PM on April 2, 2016