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Derek Lowe
Derek Lowe, an Arkansan by birth, got his BA from Hendrix College and his PhD in organic chemistry from Duke before spending time in Germany on a Humboldt Fellowship on his post-doc. He's worked for several major pharmaceutical companies since 1989 on drug discovery projects against schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, diabetes, osteoporosis and other diseases. To contact Derek email him directly: derekb.lowe@gmail.com Twitter: Dereklowe

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In the Pipeline: Don't miss Derek Lowe's excellent commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry in general at In the Pipeline

In the Pipeline

« ACC2: Great Metabolic Target, Or Total Bust? | Main | ACS Med Chem Letters »

April 8, 2010

Let's Sequence These Guys

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Posted by Derek

A very weird news item: multicellular organisms that appear to be able to live without oxygen. They're part of the little-known (and only recently codified) phylum Loricifera, and these particular organisms were collected at the bottom of the Mediterranean, in a cold, anoxic, hypersaline environment.

They have no mitochondria - after all, they don't have any oxygen to work with. Instead, they have what look like hydrogenosome organelles, producing hydrogen gas and ATP from pyruvate. I'm not sure how large an organism you can run off that sort of power source, since it looks like you only get one ATP per pyruvate (as opposed to two via the Krebs cycle), but the upper limit has just been pushed past a significant point.

Comments (3) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Biological News | General Scientific News | Life As We (Don't) Know It


COMMENTS

1. Scientific Chick on April 8, 2010 7:03 PM writes...

And I thought I'd seen it all watching Planet Earth.

This is cool stuff!

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2. eugene on April 9, 2010 2:36 AM writes...

"I'm not sure how large an organism you can run off that sort of power source"

Sounds like a good topic for a research program. Or at least a grant.

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3. student on April 9, 2010 6:27 AM writes...

As I learnt, the Krebs cycle yields 1 ATP (GTP) per se. No doubt, from 1 pyruvate we get 1 NADH+H through dehydrogenation, 3 more and a FADH2 in the Krebs cycle, and these can be exchanged for 14 ATP.

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