Researchers at UC Berkeley are working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to target and eliminate (with extreme prejudice) genetic weaknesses that can cause general performance deficits in otherwise healthy people.

The team of scientists, led by researcher Nicholas Marini and molecular and cell biology prof Jasper Rine, hope to pinpoint small genetic defects that can affect the efficiency of common enzymes. These enzyme deficiencies don’t express themselves as full-blown illness, but can cause fatigue, general malaise and other mild symptoms that can really screw up your day. Once the weaknesses are identified, doctors should be able to brew customized vitamin concoctions to counteract them.

ScienceDaily recently spoke with Marini. From the interview:

“Our studies have convinced us that there is a lot of variation in the population in these enzymes, and a lot of it affects function, and a lot of it is responsive to vitamins,” Marini said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if everybody is going to require a different optimal dose of vitamins based on their genetic makeup, based upon the kind of variance they are harboring in vitamin-dependent enzymes.”

No news on whether these super serums would turn the average cubicle jockey into a superstar, but the research looks promising so far. The team injected a sampling of human genes that code for an enzyme called methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) into yeast cells. The enzyme uses the B vitamin folate to build DNA nucleotides. The researchers found that some variations of the gene were better at synthesizing MTHFR than others. They were then able to add supplements to the yeast diet to make up for the differences.

Marini and Rine guess that most people have about five rare mutant enzymes that could be counteracted with proper supplementation. 

From the ScienceDaily interview:

“There are over 600 human enzymes that use vitamins or minerals as cofactors, and this study reports just what we found by studying one of them,” Rine said. “What this means is that, even if the odds of an individual having a defect in one gene is low, with 600 genes, we are all likely to have some mutations that limit one or more of our enzymes.”

With the price of genetic testing approaching an all-time low (some estimate that it’ll soon cost about 100 bucks for a full sequence), the findings seem promising.

So what’s the DARPA connection? Again, from the ScienceDaily interview:

“Our soldiers, like top athletes, operate under extreme conditions that may well be limited by their physiology,” Rine said. “We’re now working with the defense department to identify variants of enzymes that are remediable, and ultimately hope to identify troops that have these variants and test whether performance can be enhanced by appropriate supplementation.”

Link to the ScienceDaily article.