Function
It catalyzes the transfer of an amino group from alanine to α-ketoglutarate, the products of this reversible transamination reaction being pyruvate and glutamate.
- glutamate + pyruvate ⇌ α-ketoglutarate + alanine
ALT (and all transaminases) require the coenzyme pyridoxal-phosphate, which is converted into pyridoxamine in the first phase of the reaction, when an amino acid is converted into a keto acid.
Read more about this topic: Alanine Transaminase
Famous quotes containing the word function:
“The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)
“As a medium of exchange,... worrying regulates intimacy, and it is often an appropriate response to ordinary demands that begin to feel excessive. But from a modernized Freudian view, worrying—as a reflex response to demand—never puts the self or the objects of its interest into question, and that is precisely its function in psychic life. It domesticates self-doubt.”
—Adam Phillips, British child psychoanalyst. “Worrying and Its Discontents,” in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, p. 58, Harvard University Press (1993)
“We are thus able to distinguish thinking as the function which is to a large extent linguistic.”
—Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1934)