How the 22nd amino acid is produced - Essay Example

Even though it’s clear now that the amino acid is a product of enzymes involved reaction with two molecules of lysine, it’s important to know that the researchers are investigating if the molecule might be having complexity in its origin. Pyrrolysine is said to be very difficult to find in organisms and currently only a dozen of organisms posses it, interestingly its discovery was made in 2002 as being genetically encoded by methanogens; microbes that produce methane. The fact that it was first identified in the microbe have made the scientists to look back on the genetic code evolution.

Pyrrolysine is now among the amino acids,22 in number that are used for protein synthesis. Protein synthesis involves the successive processes of gene transcription to messenger RNA that comes from the DNA molecule; it relays the genetical information from the nucleus to the cytoplasm where transport and ribosomal RNA carries out the process of translation to produce the required protein from a collection of three amino acids called codons (Kizycki, 2011). The understanding of how the amino acids are made, that is; its biosynthetic pathway provides an in depth knowledge of how amino acids productions can be made.

How rare the amino acid is can also be of used (Kizycki, 2011) (Zhang, 2011) (Green-Church, 2011) to manipulate proteins as in the biomedical research, with its mode of synthesis well understood scientists can mimic the procedure to have mass production of other related amino acids for research purposes. The amino acid production process Lysine, other amino acids and some specific enzymes were combined and were anticipated that an intermediates would be produced, the intermediate is an amino acid that is produced during the biosynthetic process, the lysine were labeled so that when mass spectrometry was used it became heavier than the normal one, incidentally one signal produced by the instrumentation had a deviated mass that was attributed to the intermediate.

The biosynthesis of the new amino acid however comes with a surprise that its only precursor molecule is the other amino acid called lysine; this is also affirmed by the Microbiology professor Joseph Kizycki at the Ohio State University that they were not seeing the weird molecule but only the regular pyrrolysine from the two different amino acid they expected.pyrolysine was observed easily as it appeared with labeled lysine (Zhang, 2011). The process to arrive at the amino acid is considered to be very simple as it only involved only three chemical reactions though not all the chemical reactions were known or observed before.

What is amazing with the new discovery is that only three enzymes and two molecules with the same origin constitute one molecule with a completely different from the initial molecules used to make it. In the molecule, a portion resembles the precursor completely, but when you compare with anther portion, enzymes are able to link and brings out a completely different molecule not been seen at all. The inconsistent nature of the pyrrolysine necessitated the use of mass spectroscopy to precisely analyze the mass of the particles that constitute it.

The use of mass spe