Micro-organisms hormones

The catalytic, synthetic, hormonal, and inhibitory activities that have been found in proteinoids or proteinoid microspheres are listed in Table 2. The possibility that metabolic activities found were due to contamination by micro-organisms is denied by experiments under aseptic condition or by the several experimental observations. The activities of proteinoids are generally weak. In some cases, proteinoids act several orders of magnitude more slowly than do modern enzymes or organisms, but free amino acids or Leuchs polypeptides usually have no activity or less than the proteinoid composed of the same amino acids. In general, activities of proteinoids increase approximately in proportion to its molecular weight. One or more of the proteinoids has been found to meet the salient requirements of enzymes such as Michaelis-Menten kinetics, pH-activity curves, etc. 

Micro-organisms produce hormones and pheromones so as to regulate their own lives. They also generate diverse secondary metabolites such as toxins and antibiotics to control the lives of the organisms. Some of the secondary metabolites possess rather complicated structures, and have attracted the attention of chemists. Medicinally important antibiotics were especially well studied. This chapter describes our synthetic works on biofunctional molecules of microbial origin. 

Micro-organisms, however, do not exist here on earth just to be utilized by us. They have been here on earth prior to mankind, and have continuously produced biofunctional molecules to develop and regulate their own lives. Scarcity of these highly bioactive molecules makes their isolation and identification difficult, and only after the 1970s did their chemical studies become an important branch of natural products chemistry to clarify the morphogenesis of micro-organisms such as sporulation and fruiting-body formation. The present section describes our synthetic studies on microbial hormones. 

Until recently the pharmaceutical industry has led the way in the use of micro-organisms to produce desired materials such as antibiotics, insulin, growth factors and hormones. Now, specific enzymes important to the food processing industry are becoming available through recombinant DNA technology. 

Sulphur cannot be utilised by the body. It is absorbed in the form of SOf ions by a number of micro-organisms and is reduced to sulphur compounds. The main sources of sulphur are meat, fish, eggs, liver, cereals, dairy foods, nuts and leguminous plants. Sulphur is present in the body in the form of variotis organic compoimds, hormones, coenzyme A, keratin etc. It is present in the living cells as essential amino acids, pol eptides and sulphur iron proteins. 

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