If you can't live without a cup of coffee, you have something in common with the bacterium Pseudomonas putida CBB5. The bug was discovered to live on caffeine - literally!
The caffeine-munching bacterium was found in a flower bed on the University of Iowa campus.
Ryan Summers, a doctoral student there, identified four digestive proteins that it uses to break down caffeine, which allows it to live and grow, he explains in a summary of his research presented at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans.
"This work, for the first time, demonstrates the enzymes and genes utilized by bacteria to live on caffeine," he writes.
In another 4 billion years it will evolve into the perfect software engineer :)
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