Categoria: Senza categoria

  • LA VITA GRAZIE AL CARBONIO

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    TRACCIA AUDIO LA VITA GRAZIE AL CARBONIO

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    LIFE THROUGH CARBON

    Until 1828, chemists believed that compounds were divided into two distinct categories or classes: inorganic compounds, from the mineral world, such as table salt, and organic compounds, from living organisms both animals and vegetables, such as sugar.

    In 1828, a German chemist, Friedrich Wohler, succeeded in obtaining urea from inorganic compounds. Urea is a purely organic compound found in animal urine, and he obtained it by heating ammonium cyanate (NH₄ CNO), a purely inorganic reagent. The two classes, hitherto distinct, are from this point on linked together: organic chemistry can be created and synthesized from inorganic chemistry.

    In the 19th century, chemists began synthesizing more and more new molecules, effectively starting modern organic chemistry, the chemistry of carbon compounds.

    Small parenthesis: chemists not only began to synthesize organic elements, but also colours, which until then had only been natural, and so the synthetic dye industry began. The first was Perkin’s mauve colour in 1857, which changed the history of fashion and is one of the symbols of industrialization and modernity.

    In organic chemistry, biomolecules began to be classified into large groups including proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates. But surely the most sensational moment in the history of 20th-century biochemistry was the discovery of the structure of the DNA double helix in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick. Their understanding of DNA and the genetic code provided the fundamental link to link chemistry and biology forever.

    DNA is a polymer, i.e. a large molecule made up of the union of many smaller, similar molecules called monomers. The monomers that form DNA are called nucleotides. Each nucleotide consists of three distinct parts: a pentose, i.e. a sugar with 5 carbon atoms (deoxyribose), a nitrogenous base, and a phosphate group.

    The nitrogenous bases are of two classes, the purines, double-ring structures formed of nine atoms, and the pyrimidines, single-ring structures formed of six atoms. There are two purines: adenine

    (A) and guanine (G), and two pyrimidines: thymine (T) and cytosine (C), both formed of carbon and nitrogen atoms.

    In summary, DNA contains four nitrogenous bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine;

    composed of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N).

    The DNA molecule, made up of these four nitrogenous bases, has the shape of a double helix; we can imagine it as a rung ladder in which the risers are formed by alternating phosphate and sugar (pentose) groups and each step corresponds to a nitrogenous base pair. The nitrogen base pairs are planar (lying horizontally) and in the centre of the molecule are stabilized by hydrophobic interactions, which contribute to the overall stability of the double helix.

    Since the AT (adenine – thymine) and GC (guanine – cytosine) pairs have the same length, and therefore fit easily between the two rungs like the rungs of a ladder, the helix has a constant diameter. In addition, each rung is rotated about the previous rung by approximately 36°. The propeller, therefore, makes one complete turn every 10 pairs of rungs. The helix is right-handed: when viewed from above, it appears to wind clockwise.

    Every living organism has cells inside it that have a nucleus in which there are chromosomes, structures that contain a person’s genes. There are 23 pairs of chromosomes present in the nuclei of our cells.

    Genes are a nucleotide sequence, i.e. a portion of DNA. What characterizes a gene is ‘having a function. Genes are said to ‘code for a protein’, i.e. they express instructions for building the basic building blocks of our body, the proteins, the functional units of our body that perform a wide variety of tasks, from metabolic functions to transporting molecules from one place to another.

    Nucleotides are the ‘letters’ that form the instructions to make our organism, which has more than 3 billion nucleotide base pairs, function. In DNA is written all the information that parents have passed on to their children.

    More than other disciplines, chemistry has given human beings not only the ability to understand the elements of nature, but also the knowledge that they can transform them.

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  • LE MOLECOLE CHE CURANO

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    TRACCIA AUDIO LE MOLECOLE CHE CURANO

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    MOLECULES THAT HEAL

     

    In addition to hydrogen and oxygen, other elements are also essential for life, and some are crucial for survival and not perishing from infection or disease. Since ancient times, for example, it had been observed that certain elements had beneficial properties. In ancient Rome, it was said that army officers enjoyed better health than ordinary soldiers because they dined on silver plates. Modern science has confirmed the antiseptic power of silver (Ag) and copper, i.e. the property of preventing or slowing down the growth of microbes. When in contact with these metals, bacteria, fungi, and algae absorb their atoms, suffer serious metabolic damage and suffocate within hours. This property, called ‘oligodynamics’, makes certain metals more sterile than wood and plastic and is the reason why door handles and handrails are made of metal in public spaces. Be careful though, silver is fine as an antiseptic, but it should not be ingested in excess as it colours the skin blue!

    However, the most effective medicines available to us today are not simple elements, but complex

    compounds.

    The history of modern pharmacology begins with the famous Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, and biologist who lived in the 1800s. He noticed a peculiarity of biological molecules, the essence of living matter: their so-called ‘chirality’, i.e. the fact that they appear in the right and left-handed versions, like our hands. Chirality is the property of an object to be non-overlapping with its mirror image. And it has been established that all amino acids, the constituent units of all proteins in our bodies, and proteins in organic matter are ‘left-handed’. Amino acids are therefore asymmetrical molecules that can exist in two forms mirroring each other, the L-form and the D-form. These molecules are equal to each other in everything (same bonds, same atoms), but are one the mirror image of the other. Pasteur realized that proteins synthesized in the human cell only ever use the L- a form of amino acids. This simple property was a great discovery, which also enabled the creation of antibiotic drugs from 1935 onwards.

    Pasteur’s discovery defines life: ‘chirality’, according to Pasteur, ‘was the sharp dividing line that can be drawn at present to separate the chemistry of inorganic matter from that of living matter’. The great scientist showed us what the ditch is that separates the chemistry of inert matter from that of life.

    The different chirality of molecules implies a different property, and if we get the chirality wrong, we can cause disasters in the body’s levogyric environment. An example of this is thalidomide, a German drug from the 1950s that eliminated morning sickness in pregnant women. It was discovered that the benevolent and healing version of the active ingredient was mixed with one of opposite chirality because during processing the two different types could not be separated. This resulted in many children with congenital deformities being born without arms or legs.

    The ability to produce chiral drugs is due to chemist William Knowles, who through his studies on rhodium (Rh) succeeded in constructing a chiral catalyst, i.e. a reaction that could produce molecules with the right chirality. It was 1968 and we can consider this the birth year of modern pharmaceutical chemistry. This discovery, which makes us realize how the simple elements of the Periodic Table never cease to amaze us, earned Knowles the Nobel Prize in 2001.

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