Inside our bodies at every moment, our cells are orchestrating a complex dance of atoms and molecules that uses energy to create, distribute and deploy the substances on which our lives depend.
And it’s not just in our bodies: all animals carry out this dance of metabolism, and it turns out none of them do it quite the same way.
In new research published in Science Advances, we analyzed specific carbon atoms in amino acids—the building blocks of proteins—to discover distinctive fingerprints of the metabolism of different species.
These fingerprints reveal how different creatures meet the demands of survival, growth and reproduction—and offer a whole new way to understand metabolism in unprecedented detail.
A more detailed picture
We have developed a new way to study metabolism—the chemical processes inside your body that keep you alive and functioning—that reveals much more detail than previous methods. Our new technique looks at isotopes inside amino acids to see how metabolism is working.
Isotopes are versions of the same chemical element with different masses. For example, the most common kind of carbon is carbon-12, but there is also an isotope called carbon-13 that is a little heavier. We can measure