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Folate cycle revisited

Kimsie

Senior Member
Messages
397
This is not really about genetic SNP's, but I couldn't find a better place to post it.

I have been intensely studying the folate cycle and I have come up with something interesting about it that no one seems to have noticed. This article talks about how a study on rats showed that ultra high doses of folic acid greatly reduced damage to hearts of rats with one of the arteries supplying blood to part of the heart cut off for 30 minutes when they gave the rats folic acid IV 10 minutes after the blood supply was cut off. The article puzzles over what mechanism could have done this, because it takes some time to produce ATP through the purine pathway, and that pathway uses 9 ATP to make 1 purine ring.

They entirely overlooked the fact that one enzyme in the folate cycle can directly produce ATP from ADP. Most of the enzymes in the folate cycle are reversible, although I don't show that in my diagram except with the particular enzyme I am referring to here. This pathway not only produces ATP, but one NADPH also.
Folate cycle energy path.jpg

If you look closely at the enlargement of the little circle, you can see that the formyltetrahydrofolate dehydrogenase enzyme can also be a part of this pathway when it goes in the reverse direction from what I show in the diagram, but that drains NADPH. So making energy through this pathway, or pathways, can drain NADPH, serine, glycine and B6, depending on the resources and genetics of the individual.

This might account for part of the way that folate helps some people with ME/CFS.
 
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