Oxygen-Producing Bacteria Could Help Heart Attack Sufferers - Report

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Photosynthetic bacteria and light may offer hope to heart disease patients, a new study suggests.

Researchers at Stanford University say that after injecting the bacteria into the hearts of rats with cardiac disease and using light to start photosynthesis, they were able to increase the flow of oxygen, improving heart function.

“The beauty of it is that it’s a recycling system,” said Joseph Woo, senior author of the study. “You deliver the bacteria, they take up carbon dioxide, and with energy from the light, they form oxygen.”

The findings could help many who have a condition called cardiac ischemia, which restricts blood flow and the delivery of oxygen to the heart muscles.

“We thought there is an interesting relationship in nature,” Woo said. “In nature, humans exhale carbon dioxide and plants convert it back to oxygen. During a heart attack, the muscle is still trying to pump. There’s carbon dioxide but no oxygen. We wondered if there were any way to use plant cells and put them next to heart cells to produce oxygen from the carbon dioxide.”

At first, the researchers tried to use spinach and kale cells, but the chloroplasts, the structures where photosynthesis occurs, were not stable enough to live outside the plant.