Sunday, May 3, 2009

What happens in your liver when you drink alcohol



Figure 1: the active site of alcohol dehydrogenase. The catalytic zinc ion is coordinated to three amino acid side-chains in the protein and to the ethanol substrate. In the body, ethanol is subsequently oxidized by the electron transport molecule NAD; an inactive structural analogue is pictured here.


We modeled ferritin last term with a program called DS Visualizer, but my downloads were buggy and I had to use someone else's computer at the last minute. This time we're using a different program called Chimera which works on my computer, to model alcohol dehydrogenase. LS also said he found a similar open source program called Avogadro which I'd like to check out.

3 comments:

Lee Ryan said...

Looks cool, but in this case, experimentation may be more fun than simulation.

herself said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
herself said...

I don't know how I deleted my previous comment. It was just was a dumb joke about open source avocados. In case you were wondering.