Asked by Nozipho
In selecting amino acids to be used in the diet,is the optical activity of the acid important?explain your answer
Answers
Answered by
bobpursley
The body largely has enzyme pathways that can work with L-isomers only.
<<Bryan Douglas Crawford
University of New Brunswick
I think the prevalence of L-amino acids in biological systems is a quirk of our evolutionary history; there's no reason D-amino acids wouldn't work chemically, but once early life forms started building proteins out of L-amino acids, L-amino acids became abundant an it became selectively advantageous to use L-amino acids because then you could use the amino acids you obtained by eating someone else. It's a matter of compatibility; if you use D-amino acids, you have to build them all from scratch, because you're not going to find them in your environment. As long as you use L-amino acids, you don't even need to maintain the de novo synthetic pathways; you can just eat something that has those pathways (hence the 'essential' dietary amino acids).>>
<<Bryan Douglas Crawford
University of New Brunswick
I think the prevalence of L-amino acids in biological systems is a quirk of our evolutionary history; there's no reason D-amino acids wouldn't work chemically, but once early life forms started building proteins out of L-amino acids, L-amino acids became abundant an it became selectively advantageous to use L-amino acids because then you could use the amino acids you obtained by eating someone else. It's a matter of compatibility; if you use D-amino acids, you have to build them all from scratch, because you're not going to find them in your environment. As long as you use L-amino acids, you don't even need to maintain the de novo synthetic pathways; you can just eat something that has those pathways (hence the 'essential' dietary amino acids).>>
There are no AI answers yet. The ability to request AI answers is coming soon!
Submit Your Answer
We prioritize human answers over AI answers.
If you are human, and you can answer this question, please submit your answer.