This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky.

Aflatoxins. They're produced by funguses that infect crops and they can cause liver cancer immune damage and other health

problems. Rare outbreaks related to peanuts or corn happen in the US but

Aflatoxins are a big problem in the developing world.

Pretty much every study that's out there shows the vast majority of the food system

is contaminated with Aflatoxin ranging from a few fold to thousands of fold above the legal limit in the United States.

Justin Siegel, a biochemist at UC Davis.

He's part of a team.

It's an exciting set of uncommon collaborators with Mars Incorporated,

Thermo Fisher and a bunch of great universities.

That wants to try to create an enzyme

to attack afflictoxins at a vulnerable point,

a part of their molecular structure known as a lactone ring.

So it's been shown in studies a long time ago that breaking this lactone ring decreases

toxicity by several orders of magnitude.

So it should render the molecule non-toxic at that point.

Some soil microbes make compounds that can bust apart lactone rings.

They naturally break down lactones. They just can't do this

specific lactone. They can't break down aflatoxin. So Siegel hopes that an

enzyme that has the ability to attack lactones can be modified so that it works on

affletoxins and maybe you can help by playing fold it.

Fold it is a massively multiplayer online game. that was developed at the University of these proteins like they,

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