• Question: What is the importance of proteins for living beings?

    Asked by justme to SJ on 22 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: SarahJayne Boulton

      SarahJayne Boulton answered on 22 Jun 2012:

      If it wasn’t for proteins, their would be no life as we know it!

      Proteins are an important part of making muscle contract so we can move around and our heart can beat, they break down our food so we can get energy from it, they do pretty much everything – they are the workmen of our cells – highly specialised and perfectly suited to purpose.

      Did you know that some of the most dangerous diseases can come from just one protein out of the millions we have in our body being poorly made?

      Sickle cell anaemia is a disease that is caused by the red protein in our red blood cells ‘haemoglobin’ being made a different way. This different form causes the protein to twist in a strange way when it binds to oxygen to carry it around the body in the blood stream. This in turn makes the red blood cell go hard when the cell is carrying oxygen meaning it can get stuck in the narrowest blood vessels.

      There are lots of illnesses that are caused by just one little change like this, and they all go to show just how important proteins are within all living things.

Comments

  • Photo: Paige

    Paige commented on :

    Sarah is right. Proteins are the WORKHORSES of the body, of the living cell. Proteins do the work of the body… they carry things around, they can act as enzymes to get reactions going faster, they unzip your DNA to let your genes be expressed at particular times and then zip it back up again!

    Many human diseases are the result of protein abnormalities… even one abnormal protein can be a disaster for human health. Over-production of certain proteins are implicated in diseases like Alzheimer’s disease (a mental disease). All the proteins expressed in your body at a particular point in time make up your PROTEOME, and are unique to you… like a protein fingerprint!

    STRUCTURE is very important to proteins… proteins fold in complex 3-dimensional shapes that drive their function in your body. A protein without its proper structure is useless.

  • Photo: Ash

    Ash commented on :

    From the physics point of view, we only know about life that uses proteins because that’s all we have looked at. There are theoretically many different ways that life could store, process and use information.

  • Photo: SJ

    SJ commented on :

    Fair point Ash, I seem to remember reading a hypothetical article about how new life forms could exist that use silicon the way life on earth uses carbon? I wonder what they’d look like!