From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Aug 29 2002 - 05:35:09 MDT
:
On Thu, 29 Aug 2002, gts wrote:
> It is a hard fact of physical science that molecules decompose
> spontaneously. This spontaneous decomposition happens through a process
> called "quantum tunneling." Both organic and inorganic molecules are
> subject to this form of decay.
Ok, lets not go running off into the forrest unless its absolutely
necessary. I'm not enough of a chemistry expert to know whether
protein deamidation can be attributed to "quantum tunneling".
(Anders/Eugene -- comments?).
But work by Robinson & Robinson [1] has shown that proteins do undergo
deamidation reactions and therefore do "decompose" in vivo.
Their work has recently resulted in an algorithm that has calculated
the decay rete of all proteins for which crystal structures are
currently known (www.deamidation.org & deamidation.entrewave.com).
Further it has been demonstrated that the deamidation reaction seems
to be used as a signal for when to recycle proteins (of course this
isn't of much use when one gets older and the recycling apparatus
gets backlogged).
This is relatively concrete work justifying the "wear and tear"
hypothesis of aging (not that it is the only or primary cause
of aging, but a justification that aging will be multi-factorial
and involve many biological and physical processes.)
Robert
1. Robinson NE, Robinson AB., "Deamidation of human proteins",
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2001 Oct 23;98(22):12409-13
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11606750&dopt=Abstract
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:30 MST