Metabolite - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Metabolites are the intermediates and products of metabolism

Metabolism

Metabolism is the set of chemical reactions that happen in the cells of living organisms to sustain life. These processes allow organisms to grow and reproduce, maintain their structures, and respond to their environments. Metabolism is usually divided into two categories...

. The term metabolite is usually restricted to small molecule

Small molecule

In the fields of pharmacology and biochemistry, a small molecule is a low molecular weight organic compound which is by definition not a polymer...

s. A primary metabolite is directly involved in normal growth, development, and reproduction. Alcohol is an example of a primary metabolite produced in large-scale by industrial microbiology

Industrial microbiology

Industrial microbiology or microbial biotechnology encompasses the use of microorganisms in the manufacture of food or industrial products. The use of microorganisms for the production of food, either human or animal, is often considered a branch of food microbiology...

. A secondary metabolite

Secondary metabolite

Secondary metabolites are organic compounds that are not directly involved in the normal growth, development, or reproduction of an organism. Unlike primary metabolites, absence of secondary metabolities does not result in immediate death, but rather in long-term impairment of the organism's...

is not directly involved in those processes, but usually has an important ecological

Ecology

Ecology is the scientific study of the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment. Variables of interest to ecologists include the composition, distribution, amount , number, and changing states of organisms within and among ecosystems...

function. Examples include antibiotics and pigment

Pigment

A pigment is a material that changes the color of reflected or transmitted light as the result of wavelength-selective absorption. This physical process differs from fluorescence, phosphorescence, and other forms of luminescence, in which a material emits light.Many materials selectively absorb...

s such as resins and tepenes etc. Some antibiotics use primary metabolites as precursors, such as actinomycin

Actinomycin

The actinomycins are a class of polypeptide antibiotics isolated from soil bacteria of the genus Streptomyces, of which the most significant is actinomycin D. It was the first antibiotic isolated by Selman Waksman and his co-worker H. B. Woodruff in 1940.-Mechanism:Actinomycin D is primarily used...

which is created from the primary metabolite, tryptophan

Tryptophan

Tryptophan is one of the 20 standard amino acids, as well as an essential amino acid in the human diet. It is encoded in the standard genetic code as the codon UGG...

.

Examples of primary metabolites produced by industrial microbiology:

Class	Example
Alcohol	Ethanol
Amino acids	Glutamic acid, Aspartic acid
Nucleotides	5' guanylic acid
Antioxidants	Isoasorbic acid
Organic acids	Acetic acid, Lactic acid
Polyols	Glycerol
Vitamins	B₂

The metabolome

Metabolome

Metabolome refers to the complete set of small-molecule metabolites to be found within a biological sample, such as a single organism...

forms a large network of metabolic reactions, where outputs from one enzymatic chemical reaction

Chemical reaction

A chemical reaction is a process that leads to the transformation of one set of chemical substances to another. Chemical reactions can be either spontaneous, requiring no input of energy, or non-spontaneous, typically following the input of some type of energy, such as heat, light or electricity...

are inputs to other chemical reactions.

Metabolites from chemical compound

Chemical compound

A chemical compound is a pure chemical substance consisting of two or more different chemical elements that can be separated into simpler substances by chemical reactions. Chemical compounds have a unique and defined chemical structure; they consist of a fixed ratio of atoms that are held together...

s, whether inherent or pharmaceutical, are formed as part of the natural biochemical process of degrading and eliminating the compounds. The rate of degradation of a compound is an important determinant of the duration and intensity of its action. Profiling metabolites of pharmaceutical compounds, drug metabolism

Drug metabolism

Drug metabolism is the biochemical modification of pharmaceutical substances by living organisms, usually through specialized enzymatic systems. This is a form of xenobiotic metabolism. Drug metabolism often converts lipophilic chemical compounds into more readily excreted polar products...

, is an important part of drug discovery

Drug discovery

In the fields of medicine, biotechnology and pharmacology, drug discovery is the process by which drugs are discovered or designed.In the past most drugs have been discovered either by identifying the active ingredient from traditional remedies or by serendipitous discovery...

, leading to an understanding of any undesirable side effect

Side effect

In medicine, a side effect is an effect, whether therapeutic or adverse, that is secondary to the one intended; although the term is predominantly employed to describe adverse effects, it can also apply to beneficial, but unintended, consequences of the use of a drug.Occasionally, drugs are...

See also