Proteins into space — another way to waste taxpayers’ money?
Part one — the Peptide Menace
Recently I have seen some news about astronauts bringing different proteins onboard the international space station and it wasn’t for nutritional reasons. Supposedly, experiments done in space would have been of greater value than their “Earth” counterparts. As a sceptic and a scientist by nature, I decided to dig a little deeper to figure out whether that was just another excuse for having a steak in low earth orbit.
At one point human race was bored enough to start firing random things into space:
First objects to enter space (which officially starts at 100km in non-retard units) are believed to be some parts of WW2 era rockets (1949 based on Wernher von Braun V2 rocket). Later followed by a satellite Sputnik in ’57 technology has advanced enough to send various animals from mice to monkeys and dogs of which the most famous was probably Laika (‘57).
After that human followed this “not the safest mean of travel” (let’s hope Elon does something about that) and not without casualties conquered first the orbit (Gagarin ’61) and then the moon (Armstrong and Aldrin ‘69). After putting a few space stations in orbit, sending things into space has become almost a hobby for space agencies as well as for people with a little bigger pockets… let’s not forget you can send things to the moon via MoonMail (originality of name is just staggering) and the price isn’t that high if you stay within grams of payload.
So when reading random news on this great world wide web — instead of doing homework — stumbling upon “sending proteins into space” shouldn’t surprise you at all.
Wait… proteins into space?
…
Perhaps we could look into this a little closer before passing any judgments. Admittingly it seems as if somebody has read the book “most imaginative ways of spending taxpayers money” and had tried making it sound scientifically useful. A great benefit for science. Breaking the barriers of our understanding… and our budget.
Is there any need for firing protein-shakes into space instead of using them in fitness?
Let’s take a closer look.
You probably know what a protein is, or have a picture of it in one of the biology notebooks hidden deep within cellar reminding you of school years… or you are a science student and will probably click on some other link and remember never to check this webpage again. Well, for the sake of those that would like to be reminded of what a protein is, we will try to look into the main component of protein-shake first. For others, bear with me for a little while.
A protein is an important building unit of our body. Basically, we are made of fat (no offense) and …proteins. Together with some stones, or to be more precise inorganic crystals very similar to regular stones, forming our bones and our teeth. Hydroxyapatite and calcium sulphate are minerals so we are basically walking stones.
Now we all know the stones in nature don’t move much except when they roll, and even then they tend to fall apart upon impact. Also, oily droplets in the soup don’t seem very stable so the idea that we are made of those doesn’t sound very convincing. But we are, cells are nothing else than oil droplets or more accurately micelles, which means having additionally a droplet of water in this oily thing. In a soup. Crazy if you think of it that way, huh?
Well those stones surrounded in oil are perfectly able to move, live and to make this laptop I am typing on. Something seems to be missing. And yeah, you are right, that is where the protein comes in.
Or proteins. There are different types of them, a lot of different types. They are responsible for keeping our skin in one piece, for keeping muscles attached to bones (well, muscles are also proteins). Oh, and there is also the immune system fighting with rockets — proteins against invaders. Not to mention receptors in our eyes and similar. You could say that proteins are the most important constituent of our body and you wouldn’t be wrong. There is just so many of them, very different one from another performing so different functions and having so different properties that you could as well say that car is made just of metal… not taking into account different alloys, screws, tubes and electrolyte in batteries.
But proteins have some things in common, they are all made of same chemical elements that is carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen (and sometimes sulfur). Chemically speaking they are all much more similar one to another than let’s say different alloys of metals used in cars compared to tanks or airplanes. They are actually made of the same building blocks — units connected in different order. These building blocks are called amino acids and we all know you need to eat them, especially essential ones… you have probably heard about this thousand times.
So let’s sum it up. Proteins are made like LEGO bricks of amino acids, just in different order for each protein… and different length. Signalling peptides (peptide is just a more fancy name for a protein, albeit usually shorter ones) can be just a few amino acids long (glutathione with only 3 amino acids) while the largest human protein — the one in the muscles — can be from 27000 to 33000 amino acids long.
And we definitely can’t live without them. Even not eating essential amino acids results in so-called kvashi, kavashi… Kwashiorkor (ok I admit, I had to google it), usually observed in children who don’t get enough protein in their daily diet and body starts digesting itself. Scary I know, but perhaps we can talk about that some other time.
For now, stay tuned for WHY would you send your sandwich to space? I mean proteins.
Part 2 is accessible HERE — Attack of the Enzyme.
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