Bioengineered Pathway Boosts Production of Sweet, Low-Calorie Tagatose

Researchers engineered E. coli to produce tagatose by introducing a slime mold Gal1P enzyme, achieving up to 95% yield; tagatose is a rare, naturally occurring sugar about 92% as sweet as sucrose with roughly a third of the calories and no insulin spike, offering a scalable alternative to sugar and artificial sweeteners; the study lays a framework for rare-sugar production, with the market expected to reach around $250 million by 2032.