Function
Sarcosine dehydrogenase is one of the enzymes in sarcosine metabolism, which catalyzes the demethylation of sarcosine to make glycine. It is preceded by dimethylglycine dehydrogenase which turns dimethylglycine into sarcosine. Glycine can also be turned into sarcosine by glycine N-methyltransferase. Since glycine is the production of sarcosine dehydrogenase catalyzed reaction, aside from sarcosine metabolism, the enzyme is also indirectly connected to the creatine cycle and the respiratory chain in the mitochondria (See figure 4 for pathway). Even so, the biological significance of sarcosine dehydrogenase beyond sarcosine metabolism is not entirely known. In a study of hereditary hemochromatosis using both wild type and HFE (gene) deficient mice fed with 2 percent carbonyl iron supplemented diet, sarcosine dehydrogenase was shown to be down-regulated in HFE deficient mice, but role sarcosine dehydrogenase in iron metabolism is unknown from the experiment conducted.
Read more about this topic: Sarcosine Dehydrogenase
Famous quotes containing the word function:
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
—Susanne K. Langer (18951985)
“Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.”
—Robert Warshow (19171955)
“The intension of a proposition comprises whatever the proposition entails: and it includes nothing else.... The connotation or intension of a function comprises all that attribution of this predicate to anything entails as also predicable to that thing.”
—Clarence Lewis (18831964)