Blob said:
Ah cool, I recently finished my nutrition degree which surprisingly had a lot more biochemistry and medicine than I ever thought It would. I'd imagine what youre doing would have gone far beyond anything I had to learn though. Any interesting findings you're allowed to share? |
Most of my PhD research has involved proteins which react with nitric oxide to form nitrate. Nitric oxide has turned out to be an important signalling molecule in the cardiovascular and nervous systems specifically, but we know that at higher concentrations it can be detrimental so work is being done to look at the systems by which your body might get rid of nitric oxide so that it doesn't build up to detrimental levels. One such protein is Myoglobin which some previous research had indicated would produce high concentrations of other toxic compounds so it couldn't be the main way in which nitric oxide is detoxified. My research indicated that this wasn't actuallythe case and that high concentrations of toxic compounds were not built up during the reaction. It also seems to indicate that the current assumed reaction mechanism of forming peroxynitrite at the heme which will then rearrange in some way to form nitrate might not be true which would indicate a concerted reaction between oxygen and nitric oxide to form nitrate. If you have access to ACS here's the link to the article: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ic400697a
Right now I'm writing up a paper on a protein from Tuberculosis that does the same reaction which we are interested in because it does the same reaction as myoglobin but does it incredibly efficiently. All the experiments are done and now I'm working on the write up with my advisor.
Mostly I'm just writing my thesis though which will be done in two months and I'll finally have my PhD and move on in my career.
Apologies if that was an overly long explanation, and we're quickly veering off topic so if you'd like to continue the discussion beyond this I'll suggest we do so through walls or PMs.
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