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Hi my darlings, welcome to my new series where I, a biochemist, debunk science related scams and misconceptions. In today’s episode, we’re debunking collagen supplements!
What is collagen?
Collagen is the main structural protein present in your body. It is mainly present in bones, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, and skin. Collagen keeps these tissues together, along with making them strong, flexible, elastic, and also capable of repair when damaged.
But after all, what is a protein?
Everyone’s heard of the word protein, but not as many people can define exactly what it is. Proteins are a class of biomolecules, meaning there are many, many proteins out there, with their own individual functions.
Proteins are made up of building blocks called amino acids. In humans, there are 20 naturally occurring amino acids, and they can join up in all kinds of ways to form different kinds of peptides, which in turn fold up into more complex structures — proteins!
Here is a simplified diagram of protein structure:
Amino acids can join up in all sorts of ways, in different sequences and different numbers. This is how proteins as a class can be so vast, and how they can fulfill so many different functions in your body.
What happens when you ingest proteins?
When you eat anything containing proteins, your digestive system breaks them down into individual amino acids or smaller, more manageable chains (peptides).
All proteins get this treatment, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Your body breaks down proteins in food into amino acids/small chains, then uses them as building blocks to make up whatever proteins it wants. This can be collagen, enzymes, antibodies, anything your body deems necessary.
You cannot deliberately target the proteins you ingest towards anything in particular.
When you ingest collagen, it gets broken down like any other protein, and your body will do whatever it needs with those smaller building blocks.
This is why collagen supplements are a scam. You cannot ingest collagen and target it towards anything specific.
How is collagen produced? Can you do anything about it?
Your body naturally produces collagen, and while that production does slow with age, people of all ages produce collagen. It’s a natural part of healing wounds and keeping tissues together in your body!
Science is still figuring out exactly how to promote real collagen synthesis in humans. Vitamin C is a necessary cofactor in collagen production, and while you can’t make sure all of the vitamin C you ingest goes towards making collagen, if you are deficient in it, it will in fact make collagen production slower.
This is why scurvy (vitamin C deficiency) wreaks all sorts of havoc in your connective tissues. Your body needs it to build collagen.
The same logic applies here. You can’t target the proteins you eat towards collagen production specifically, but if your body doesn’t have the amino acids (which come from proteins) to build that collagen, then it obviously can’t make it!
Basically: make sure you aren’t deficient in the stuff your body needs to build collagen, even though you can’t guarantee that’s what your body will do with it.
And you don’t need fancy supplements for that. If you have adequate protein and vitamin C in your diet, you should be set!
Collagen supplements? More like certified SUPPLESCAM!
Alien life with different chemistry from ourselves is a very interesting topic*, but consider: life based on different states of matter.
Organisms on Earth are built out of a mixture of liquids and solids, with chemical interactions occurring in a liquid medium. On a smaller scale, we are made out of cells, which exploit the immiscibility of lipids and water to enclose a watery salty medium within lipid membranes. On a large scale, this results in mostly solid but squishy bodies. This is a good compromise to move chemicals around while also allowing enough concentration to have them react.
Can we accomplish that in a different way?
Very low temperature life kept together by weaker atomic bonds. The lasting parts of our bodies are kept together by rather strong kinds of bonds: covalent (e.g. in fibrous proteins) and ionic (e.g. in bone mineral). Weaker hydrogen bonds are used in protein folding, making them more reversible. Since bonds are more stable at lower temperature, we could imagine organisms (perhaps in the liquid methane of Titan, or the liquid nitrogen of Triton) kept together entirely by hydrogen bonds -- effectively, living ice -- or by the even weaker Van der Waals bonds.
I already described a slime mold-like lifeform, with a body made out of isolated cells in a liquid matrix communicating through chemical tags, in my SpecBio concepts #2 and #6. May occasionally form solid structures.
Could we give up even cell membranes and have life that is truly purely liquid? We can imagine an emulsion of immiscible polar (e.g. water) and non-polar (e.g. hydrocarbons) liquids, such as we might find in pockets on a Titan-like world. The liquid with the smaller volume would form discrete chemical-concentrating droplets inside the other, perhaps switching once in a while as the relative quantities change -- living vinaigrette.
Liquid crystals are also another good way to create stable patterns without large-scale solid components. Dissolved molecules change orientation, and therefore the local properties of the fluid, in response to changes in temperature, concentration, or electric fields.
Another type of liquid (or, theoretically, gaseous) life could be based on convection cells, driven by a temperature difference (presumably geothermal at first, but the source of heat might also be exothermic reactions or radioactive decay). Bénard cells are quite regular and stable, and I can see them serving as the cells of an organism, though on a much larger scale. (There's at least one example of such life in scifi: the Qax in the Xeelee Sequence).
On the opposite end, we could imagine purely solid life, growing as extremely elaborate crystals; perhaps made of semiconductor minerals that can modulate and transport electric currents. Genetic information could be carried as patterns of doping or of imperfections in the crystalline matrix. I can imagine ecosystems of living rocks, growing mica-like photovoltaic sheets to harvest sunlight, and slowly moving by inducing magnetic fields around themselves.
It's possible that the earliest life on Earth developed on the surface of mineral layers like montmorillonite clay, using it as template for replication and as catalyzer for metabolic reactions. We could imagine life that never left this condition and developed elaborate ecosystems that are strictly two-dimensional, existing only in a one-molecule-thick film between rocks and water.
Even better: how about (partially) gaseous life? Pure gases would probably disperse chemicals too much for reactions to occur, but we could imagine living foam in which "cells" are actually high-pressure gas bubbles in a liquid medium -- or, on the contrary, living aerosol in which they are droplets of liquid suspended in a dense atmosphere, like the haze of Venus or Titan.
* Check out the links in section 3a here! Though I guess I'll have to update the links for the Astrobiology Primer 3.0 -- some asshole seems to have taken them out of free access just a couple days ago. Some interesting ideas are replacing carbon with high-temperature silicates, low-temperature silicones, nitrogen-phosphorus polymers, polysulfur, and polyoxometalates; and water with ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, sulfuric acid, low-temperature methane or nitrogen, and supercritical carbon dioxide.)
All pics from Wiki Commons. Cleander version of the atomic bonds picture from here.
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A trio of researchers from the University of São Paulo (USP) and São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil has developed a method to obta
A trio of researchers from the University of São Paulo (USP) and São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil has developed a method to obtain an enzyme from a fungus cultivated in agricultural waste that promotes cellulose pulp bleaching, an important paper production process. Their study is published in the journal BioResources.
letter sequence in this ask matching protein-coding amino acids:
Wawawawawawawawawa
protein guy analysis:
in general, the very short ones do tend to work out better because there isn't much structure to model, so there are only so many places each atom could reasonably be. this is a shining example of that idea, and probably the highest confidence structure i've gotten (or at least close to it!) it's small enough that it's a bit hard to really evaluate how accurate things are, but this little peptide looks pretty happy :) the pLDDT colour scale should be in my pinned post, but they range from orange to blue, and this is easily one of the blue-est ones i've ever seen for this blog
