At the beginning of the semester, we all pretty much agreed that one thing we did not want as part of our learning environment was competition. Ironically, competition is my favorite lesson from lecture this week.
I was passing through the campus center earlier today and found myself sneezing uncontrollably. I got to my dorm and my nose and eyes were running non-stop- I do not have a cold. Previous experience has taught me that antihistamines are usually the solution to such problems and so I figured histamine would be the cause. A few minutes of internet research later I found out histamine an inflammatory mediator is released by antibody bound mast cells when allergens are inhaled and causes sneezing, watery eyes and inflamed nasal passages, basically my symptoms, but even more interesting, histamine’s structure contains a 5 member ring with 2 nitrogens, just like histidine (nature’s economy)!
Moving on to read about anti-histamines taught me that they are ‘inverse agonists’ to the histamine receptor, essentially, they compete with histamine in binding to the receptor and when they do, they do not cause the unfortunate effects that histamine does. I’m really glad competition exists and affects the interactions of biochemical molecules because now I can breath freely!
this is really interesting! an amino acid that is slightly adjusted can perform such an important action in our daily lives! This is just like the amino acid derivates we talked about in class today where their functions can be changed drastically by a few modifications!