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 have been having a curry with Dulce Papy-Garcia from UPEC, who had examined considered 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 change put up synthesis proteins, polysaccharides and different molecules. We didn’t give you a solution,  however the dialog led Ed and myself to think about that the query merited exploration. 

This we thought can be a easy matter. 

It turned out to be probably the most troublesome 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 seaside of sulfate and phosphate, however which in actuality was a somewhat dank quagmire. There’s although one thing about power 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 printed at Royal Society Interfaces, “Phosphorylation and sulfation share a standard biosynthetic pathway, however prolong biochemical and evolutionary range of organic macromolecules in distinct methods”.

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