As we age, we are more prone to several chronic diseases, like cancer. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have found something that explains this trend, and it involves the ozone in the atmosphere.
Study leader and deputy director of Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division, Kevin Wilson, says, “The beauty of nature is that it often decides to use similar chemistries throughout a system, but we never thought that we would find a common link between atmospheric chemistry, and the chemistry of our bodies and food. Our study is the first to explore another chemical pathway that might affect how well the cells in our bodies - and even our food - can respond to oxidative stress, such as pollution, over time.”
The unsaturated lipids in our bodies are building blocks for cell walls. Over time, unsaturated lipids and other molecules like carbohydrates and protein degrade due to autoxidation, where hydroxyl radicals attack the unsaturated lipids in our body. The damage done to the unsaturated lipids increases the likelihood of getting cancer and other age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s.
The conventional thinking was that hydroxyl radicals worked alone to attack unsaturated lipids, but Wilson and his team discovered that hydroxyl radicals work with molecules called Criegee intermediates. The researchers separated the Criegee intermediates from the hydroxyl radicals by adding “scavenger” alcohol molecules that would only react with the Criegee intermediates and render them inert. When they added the alcohol molecules, they also noticed that the lipid degradation slowed. Said Wilson, “This surprised us because hydroxyl radicals were known to cause oxidative damage to cells, but what wasn't known before our study is that hydroxyl does this via the formation of Criegee intermediates.”
The research study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).