Sulfate or Phosphate? | Ferniglab Weblog

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 certainly one of our PhD college students. A matter we mentioned at size was ‘why sulfate’. That’s, why does biology use each sulfate and phosphate to switch 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 vital 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 relatively dank quagmire. There’s although one thing about energy 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 standard biosynthetic pathway, however lengthen biochemical and evolutionary range of organic macromolecules in distinct methods”.

That is under no circumstances the final phrase on the matter, however together with some earlier considerate papers we cite (if we have now missed one, please let me know) it offers some concepts which will assist us to know why biology co-opted explicit components from the inorganic world to carry out teams of capabilities very important to life as we all know it now.