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JOANNE STUBBE: If you look
at the vitamin bottle,

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you have all these vitamins
you eat, like, what

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do they call them?

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Biotin, riboflavin, pyridoxal.

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So all of those small, organic
molecules, and they all

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have chemical reactivity and
they interact with the protein

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and allow the protein to do
chemistry that can't normally

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be carried out by just the amino
acid side chains of the protein

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in the active site
of the enzyme.

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So the vitamins you
eat are not actually

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what's interacting
with the protein,

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they need to be modified.

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So they are the
precursors to what

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are called co-factors
that, again,

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expand the repertoire of what's
found in enzymatic systems.

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So you have a whole bunch
of organic co-factors

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that actually can be
made spontaneously.

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If you throw in some simple
molecules like cyanide

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and stuff, these things
all self-assemble,

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so they're all from
the primordial soup.

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And in fact, many
of these vitamins

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can do chemistry without
any enzyme at all.

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But they can't do
it specifically.

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And they can't do it rapidly.

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So we have all these
organic molecules

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that can self-assemble
that expand the repertoire,

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but if you look at a vitamin
bottle, you will see minerals.

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And that's one thing that I
think most biochemistry courses

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don't talk about, is metals.

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And it's now proposed
that between 35% and 50%

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of all the proteins in
our body have metals that

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are essential for function.

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And so these minerals that you
eat, iron or zinc or calcium,

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all play a central role,
again, in expanding.

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They all help in many
cases facilitate chemical

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transformations,
and in the way we

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can understand by understanding
basic chemical principles.

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So the vitamin
bottle, we come back

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to over and over again through
the course of the semester,

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because all the enzymes
in metabolic pathways

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have different kinds of
co-factors that are required

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to make the enzymes function.