Oxygen is essential to human life, we cannot survive without it. However it also develops certain toxic in our body and poses a threat to the human body. Human body has certain defense mechanisms so that is why we are able to fight against these toxic effects of the oxygen. However the dangers are still not eliminated completely as our natural defenses are not perfectly equipped to fight against the damaging effects of oxygen.

The toxic reaction, called the oxidative stress causes many diseases like Alzheimer’s, heart disease and cancer, and has been suggested as a major contribute to the aging.

In a recent study done by the professors at the ‘University of Michigan’, they tried to find out the reason behind the survival of certain cells and organisms against the oxidative stress. For this, they adopted an innovative method to observe how the proteins which are the major building blocks of body get affected by the oxidative stress.

The study was led by Ursula Jakob; an associate professor was fascinated to see that there are certain proteins which possess an ability to use amino acids to show sensitivity towards the oxidative stress. These amino acids are called ‘cysteines’.

He developed a new technique to study these proteins. This new technique named as ‘OxICAT’ was able to measure the oxidation state of thousand of proteins in a single experiment.

During the study, the researchers were surprised to find that these new proteins which have been discovered not only show sensitivity towards the oxidative stress but some of these also help the cells to fight against the oxidative stress conditions.

Lars Leichert, a postdoctoral research fellow in Jakob’s lab and first author of the study tried to understand the reason behind the successful fight and survival of certain cells and organisms in spite of the fact that the process of oxidative stress plays an important role in all the diseases. This has given a new insight to the field of molecular mechanism of aging. It also throws light on the role of oxidative stress in this process.

The survival of certain cells and the organisms against this toxic reaction in certain diseases could lead to development of more efficient anti-oxidant strategies.

This study was carried out by the contributory effort of various well known health organizations. The experiments for the study were carried out in the lab of Philip Andrews, a professor of biological chemistry. He says that involvement of such prominent organizations and such infrastructure being devoted to this study reveals the importance of this work.

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