Molecules: You'd better learn to live with them.
About 80 years ago, a scientist [pdf] wanted to learn about cholesterol metabolism. He took chicken feed and extracted it with organic solvent. In order make sure fat-soluble vitamins weren't left out, he added in cod liver oil (giving vitamins A and D, which were known). Then his unsuspecting chicks munched on cholesterol-free, cod-liver doped feed. Within weeks, they began hemorrhaging, and their blood failed to clot.
It was already known at the time that animals could synthesize cholesterol all on their own - and just to prove nothing was up, he added cholesterol back into the feed. No dice. Vitamin C or lemon juice didn't help - this wasn't scurvy (and in fact, humans are just about the only animal that can get scurvy).
It turned out he'd been extracting vitamin K along with the cholesterol (K for Koagulation, in the German that dominated the chemistry literature of the day). Naphthoquinone, above, is the business end of a suite of coagulation-aiding compounds we call vitamin K.
Interestingly, if Henrik Dam had been a bit more of a slob, he'd have never discovered the stuff. Bacteria in the digestive tract produce Vitamin K efficiently, and chicks, being birds, tend to crap all over everything, including their food. The industrious rascals enrich their own food with vitamin supplements! Eat up, it's good for you!
Email this entry to a friend
View the Technorati Link Cosmos for this entry
Comments
Guinea pigs get scurvy, primates get scurvy, dalamatians get gout. The rest of us get Republicants and Democraps. "...such inner repentance is worthless unless it produces various outward mortification of the flesh," Martin Luther, Third Thesis.
Rabbits defecate two kinds of pellets, waste and recycle. If we ever get rabbits that can hold a conversation...
Posted by: Uncle Al | December 6, 2007 9:04 PM
Uncle Al, your brain works in mysterious and fascinating ways. I wish I could get in there and figure it out. ...That sounded icky...
But on another note, Warfarin! Effectively lowers the amount of Vitamin K and thus thins blood, or, in an overdose, causes death by bleeding all over a mouse trap.
Posted by: Vince Noir | December 11, 2007 2:10 AM
CONTROLLED ANITCOAGULATION IS QUITE A PROJECT WITH THE WARFARIN-LIKE DRUGS....OUR GUT BACTERIA MUST WORK HARD ALL THE TIME EVEN WITHOUT KALE, AND BROCCOLI....
Posted by: mary efremov | January 3, 2008 12:35 PM