Publication in Nature: Palladium-mediated enzyme activation suggests multiphase initiation of glycogenesis
A new IQTCUB article have been published by the group of Carme Rovira in the prestigous journal Nature.
You can check it in the following link
Glycogen is the key energy storage molecule in all higher organisms and many lower ones. It’s where the glucose that fuels us is stored and release from. However, the precise mechanisms by which glycogen is formed at its very start have remained unclear until now. At the heart of the glycogen particle is a protein that starts the process off by, remarkably, decorating itself with glucose. This ‘self-sweetening’ protein – glycogenin – has been hard to understand since, by definition, as it is decorating itself it is also changing (and so it’s mechanism is ever-changing too). This seeming conundrum in basic human Biology and health has now been unpicked by using Chemistry – mediated by the unnatural metal palladium – to ‘jump start’ or ‘shunt’ into these different decorated forms directly. Both experiments (performed at the University of Oxford) and first principles modeling (performed at the IQTCUB) reveal a surprisingly tolerant process to glycogen’s creation and growth, which then become very precise as it goes on. This new of way of ‘jumping’ into different states of Biology using Chemistry suggests a new way of understanding and even programming Biology directly.
