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What Makes Your Sweat Stink

| April 2, 2015 Comment

What Makes Your Sweat Stink – Researchers from the University of York, UK,  have identified the genes that cause your sweat to stink.

It’s not just hygiene; your genes can make you smell bad as well, particularly if you have more of the bad bacteria that cause the stink.

The bacteria, staphylococcus hominis, in your underarm microbiome, produce an unpleasant body odor as they break down the molecules in sweat. What causes the smell are thioalcohols, and researchers have identified the genes encoding the proteins responsible for producing free thioalcohols. The gene was present not only in staphylococcus hominis but also in two other staphylococcus species that produce thioalcohols.

Even a small number of these bacteria can cause an extremely smelly odor, which is identified as an oniony or rotten eggs odor. Daniel Bawdon and Gavin Thomas of York, and Gordon James and Diana Cox of Unilever, say that, “only a certain limited number of species seem to create this biochemical reaction.” Though they don’t understand how this happens, they may now know what path to travel to stop this chemical process from happening.

Deodorants and anti-antiperspirants don’t completely remove the odor, they can mask the smell or remove some of the smell by killing some of the bacteria. Researchers say that to kill the body odor, what’s needed is a product that could target thioalcohol production.

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