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The story of its discovery by Alexander Fleming is one of serendipity. For Fleming, it was not the fall of an apple, but that of mucous landing in a bacterial culture that revealed the efficacy of Lysozyme in rupturing the cell wall of bacteria. It is this powerful bacteriolytic effect that led to its naming.

Much loved Lysozyme

Those that make their way past the shell are met with the bacteriolytic action that its discoverer, Alexander Fleming, first called ‘remarkable’ over 100 years ago. Much work followed to build on these earliest observations, yielding the applications for which Lysozyme is now relied upon.

Fleming’s shyness, his being “not a great lecturer,” as acknowledged by Allison, may partly account for the poor reception received at the first reading of the initial paper describing lysozyme. At this presentation in December 1921 held at the Medical Research Club, an exclusive audience of the leading medical practitioners, no questions were asked¹.

It is commonly accepted that human lactoferrin is an important component of innate immunity, and can interact with microorganisms by the iron sequestration mechanism and microbial molecules at the intestinal lumen.

The control of iron, its location, and concentration is of utmost importance for the thriving of life on Earth; animals, plants, and micro-organisms. Iron (with the chemical symbol Fe) is the fourth most common element in the Earth’s crust and the most abundant transition metal in the human body.

Its main purpose in QC will be the quantification of individual proteins (e.g. Lysozyme and impurities) in a mixture.

Trypsin SE

Neova Technologies Inc. extracts pancreatic enzymes from government certified porcine sources using multiple processing methods.

The second installment of our 100 Years of Lysozyme series is now live. This week, we discover how the abundance of Lysozyme in eggs was first discovered (hint: it wasn’t in the supermarket) and what this meant for Fleming’s extraction of tears using lemons.
 

Fleming was not only a Nobel prize-winning scientific mind, but he also had a real appreciation of art. Quite a capable artist himself, having a watercolor hung by the Royal Society of British Water Colour Artists, Fleming also experimented in the lab with pigment-producing microbes.

Trypsin SE finds critical applications in the production of medical food, hydrolysed whey protein, and hypo-allergenic infant formula. In mammals, the constituent enzymes of pancreatin are synthesised as inactive precursors (known as proenzymes or zymogens), protecting and preventing the pancreas from digesting itself.

A feature shared across species is its synthesis as an inactive precursor. For mammals, this is trypsinogen, which once secreted from the pancreas is released into the small intestine where it is activated. This property is protective, preventing self-digestion of the pancreas by keeping active trypsin from ever coming into direct contact.

Tryptophan’s journey to the brain; from food to cognition-critical serotonin. Clinical studies have shown improved working memory, reaction to positive information, and alertness for participants taking NA2R^® compared to placebo controls.