The preparation of glutathione containing radioactive sulfur

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1939
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 160 KB
• Volume: 227
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0016-0032
• DOI: 10.1016/s0016-0032(39)90613-7

✦ Synopsis

That sulfur-containing compounds are essential to the life and growth of animals has long been known. Such compounds as cystine, an amino acid containing sulfur, or glutathione, a tripeptide, of which cystine is a part, have been found in most of the body tissues; but the exact role which they play in metabolism, or the mechanism of their synthesis has not yet been discovered. It is presumable that if it were possible to label a sulfur compound, fed to an animal, its course throughout the body could then be traced, and in this way information be obtained as to which organs are most concerned in sulfur metabolism, what part these compounds play in the body, how they are formed and why they are so essential to life. The present work was undertaken to find a method of obtaining such a compound.

A means of labelling atoms has been provided in the recently invented cyclotron, which is capable of 'producing artificially radioactive atoms. Particles can be accelerated in the cyclotron to very great energies and allowed to bombard ordinary elements, resulting in the formation of the radioactive isotopes of the bombarded element, or, in some cases, of new elements. Thus the bombardment of sulfur by IO Mev. deuterons accelerated by the cyclotron of the Biochemical Research Foundation resulted in the conversion of a part of the sulfur into its radioactive isotope S 35 according to the following reaction 16 S34 "~ 1H 2 ~ 16S ~ + IH'.