I think biochemistry is pretty sweet, but how “sweet”’s your blood after you eat? For people with diabetes, that’s something they might need to measure, and teaching you the science behind it would be my pleasure! The ability of glucose to reduce allows glucometers to deduce, the concentration of sugar after you drink juice, helping diabetics know how much insulin to infuse! But what type of insulin should you use???

blog: [ Ссылка ]

Note: adapted from a mashup of past posts with more details I link to

Insulin is a hormone (chemical messenger) your body uses to help control blood sugar levels. I’m grateful that I don’t have diabetes, but, for people who do, their body has a hard time making and/or “hearing” insulin’s call to “let glucose in!” As a result, they have trouble controlling blood sugar levels, so they often use devices called glucometers to measure blood glucose levels. And then, they may turn to “designer insulin” which can act fast or slow thanks to some cool biochemistry.

Diabetes is a disease where the body either doesn’t make (type 1 diabetes (T1D)) or can’t use effectively (type 2 diabetes (T2D)) a hormone called insulin. Hormones are chemical messengers that can relay messages throughout & between cells in your body. Different hormones are made of different building blocks & relay different messages.

Insulin is a peptide hormone, so it’s made up of amino acids (these are the same “letters” as proteins us but proteins are more like novels while peptide hormones are like “text messages”). The text sender is an organ called the pancreas, & the message it relays is - there’s a lot of sugar in the blood - let’s take some into the cells, use some, & store some, why don’t we?

The pancreas basically sends out a “mass text” to cells throughout the body in the form of insulin. The cells respond by opening their doors to glucose (the main monosaccharide (single sugar unit)), importing it from the bloodstream into the cells thus lowering the amount of glucose in the blood. Since glucose is hydrophilic (water-loving), it needs help getting through the hydrophobic, fatty membranes surrounding a cell. Help is provided via specialized transporter proteins that provide a channel through. These transporters are stored in membrane-bound vesicles inside the cell - when the cell gets insulin’s message (by insulin binding to receptors on the cell surface), those vesicles fuse with the outer membrane, inserting these transporters into it and thus providing a path in.

Additionally, insulin tells cells in the liver to “turn on” an enzyme called glycogen synthase, which strings excess glucose into chains (polysaccharides) called glycogen for storage. more on glycogen here: [ Ссылка ]

Too much sugar is hypERglycemia (remember ovER). Too little sugar is hyPOglycemia (remember below). Both are bad. Which is why having a properly-functioning “early alert” system through insulin signaling is so important. It gives your cells time to prepare & avert a crisis.

But T1D is like the text message never being sent and T2D is like the text gets sent but the phones have the caller on their block list so they never hear the message. If cells are phones, it’s not that they’re completely turned off - they can still get other messages fine, but their bodies have become “desensitized” to it.

Without a functional natural “early alert” system, diabetics need an “unnatural” way to measure how much glucose is in their blood and, if appropriate, inject/infuse insulin (if sugar’s too high) or eat some sugar if it’s too low. But in order to know what, if any, correcting is required, you need to know what your blood sugar level currently is & common ways to do this take advantage of glucose’s ability to act as a “reducing agent.”

Much more on this in other posts, but basically, molecules interact through their electrons (negatively-charged subatomic particles that whizz around the atoms’ positively-charged nucleus). Reduction and oxidation (redox) are just fancy terms to describe the movement of electrons between them.

You can remember which is which with OIL RIG: Oxidation Is Loss (of electrons) and Reduction is Gain (of electrons). Much more here: blog form - [ Ссылка ] ; YouTube [ Ссылка ]   

Reducing agents are agents of reduction - they cause something to be reduced and are oxidized in the process. So in order to serve as a reducing agent, a molecule has to be able to be willing and able to give up an electron(s), reducing the thing it gives it to and getting oxidized in the process.

Since glucose is a reducing agent, it will donate electrons, and if we can measure how many electrons are getting transferred - either directly (electron movement is current so you can measure current produced) or indirectly (e.g. transfer them from something that changes color upon losing them) - we can figure out how much glucose there is.

Finished in comments

свернуть