Metabolomics

At some point I’m going to need to review principal component analysis to truly understand this metabolomics study that identified a small molecule phermone.

ACIE paper

Desmosterol needed for HCV

Priscilla Yang and co-workers from Harvard have reported in JACS on the identification of desmosterol needed for heptatitis C virus protein expression and viral genomic RNA.  I wonder why JACS has a green text background now in the articles instead of blue…

JACS paper

Phosphatidylcholine Leads to TMAO

Stanley Hazen and co-workers in the Cleveland Clinic have reported in Nature on the metabolism of phosphatidyl choline, which gets converted to choline.  Choline in turn converts to trimethylamine by bacteria in the gut and trimethylamine turns into trimethylamine oxide by our flavin mono-oxygenase enzymes (FMO).  TMAO upregulates the expression of macrophage scavenger receptors.

 

Nature paper

Valproic Acid Monitoring

Renato Zenobi and colleagues at ETH Zurich have reported in Chem Comm on a way to detect the pharmacokinetics of valproic acid, a drug used to treat epilepsy.

Chem Comm paper