Sulfate or Phosphate?
November 24, 2022 by ferniglab
Some months earlier than @robField’s tweet setting off the practice that led to the Eu sensor that discriminates PAP/PAPS, Ed Yates and myself had been having a curry with Dulce Papy-Garcia from UPEC, who had examined one in all our PhD college students. A matter we mentioned at size was ‘why sulfate’. That’s, why does biology use each sulfate and phosphate to change put up synthesis proteins, polysaccharides and different molecules. We didn’t provide you with a solution, however the dialog led Ed and myself to think about that the query merited exploration.
This we thought could be a easy matter.
It turned out to be one of the crucial tough papers Ed and myself have written, to the extent that after N drafts (the place N is a considerably bigger quantity than both of us had skilled in any earlier writing train) and too many summers we nonetheless had nothing passable. So, we cunningly inveigled two colleagues, Tim Rudd from NIBSC and Marcelo Lima from Keele to affix us on what we marketed because the sunny seashore of sulfate and phosphate, however which in actuality was a slightly dank quagmire. There’s although one thing about power in numbers, and with very useful enter from Steve Butler in Loughborough, we arrived at what we thought of a passable synthesis. Fortunately, the reviewers concurred, and the paper is now revealed at Royal Society Interfaces, “Phosphorylation and sulfation share a typical biosynthetic pathway, however lengthen biochemical and evolutionary variety of organic macromolecules in distinct methods”.
That is in no way the final phrase on the matter, however together with some earlier considerate papers we cite (if now we have missed one, please let me know) it gives some concepts that will assist us to grasp why biology co-opted specific components from the inorganic world to carry out teams of capabilities very important to life as we all know it now.
