Mitochondria isolated from pea leaves (Pisum sativum L.) readily oxidized malate and glycine as substrates. The addition of glycine to mitochondria oxidizing malate in state 3 diminished the rate of malate oxidation. When glycine was added to mitochondria oxidizing malate in state 4, however, the rate of malate oxidation was either unaffected or stimulated. The reason both glycine and malate ca...

To determine the exact potency of inhibitors acting at the glycine site of the NMDA receptor complex using [3H]glycine as a radioligand, the true equilibrium constant (KD) of the radioligand has to be known. To achieve this goal, (1) the contamination of water by glycine was studied, (2) the true affinity of glycine for the NMDA receptor was estimated by different methods, and (3) the inhibitio...

Strychnine poisoning leads to seizures that have traditionally been attributed to competitive antagonism of glycine receptors in the spinal cord. Although glycine is thought to act as an inhibitory neurotransmitter, a strychnine-insensitive glycine (Gly2) receptor has been recently described in cultured mouse neurons that is thought to be allosterically linked to the excitatory amino acid NMDA ...

Glycine is the simplest amino acid and is used as a metabolic product in some bacteria. However, an excess of glycine inhibits the growth of many bacteria, and it is used as a nonspecific antiseptic agent due to its low level of toxicity in animals. The effect of glycine on Helicobacter pylori is not precisely known. The present study was conducted to investigate (i) the effect of glycine on cl...

For decades neuroreceptor research has focused on the development of NMDA glycine-site antagonists, after Johnson and Ascher found out in 1987 about the co-agonistic character of this achiral amino acid at the NMDA receptor. Contrary to the inhibitory glycine receptor (glycine(A)) the glycine binding site on the NMDA receptor (glycine(B)) is strychnine-insensitive. A great diversity of diseases...

Glycine is known as an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the spinal cord and forebrain but its precise role in the forebrain is largely overlooked. This investigation evaluated whether glycine alters acetylcholine, glutamate or dopamine release from striatal tissue using an in vitro approach. We observed that while glycine induced a robust (3)H-acetylcholine release ((3)H-ACh) from superfused stri...

Listeria monocytogenes is a pathogenic bacterium that can grow at low temperatures and elevated osmolarity. The organism survives these stresses by the intracellular accumulation of osmolytes: low-molecular-weight organic compounds which exert a counterbalancing force. The primary osmolyte in L. monocytogenes is glycine betaine, which is accumulated from the environment via two transport system...

The vibrational dynamics of water around glycine was investigated by using Raman spectroscopy and inelastic neutron scattering. Experiments of deuterated glycine versus deuterium were performed as comparison. The study shows that for glycine, the exchange of proton–deuteron on the active NH+3 side was easy, whereas there was hardly exchange on the CH2 side. Comparing different proportion of gly...