PROTEIN TURNOVER WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO MAN

¹ Department of Community Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London WC1E 7HT

This review is concerned with rates of N flux in the living animal rather than with mechanisms of protein synthesis and breakdown at the cellular level. Methods of measuring protein turnover in the whole body are discussed, with special emphasis on studies in man, and results obtained by different methods have been compared.

Aspects of whole body protein turnover which are of physiological interest include its relation to body size, growth and development, energy metabolism and food intake. There are substantial increases in protein turnover in injury, and changes that occur in exercise are beginning to be explored.

From the physiological point of view these results point the need for future research along two main lines. The first is that of regulation: a wide variety of hormones stimulate or repress protein synthesis and breakdown, with varying actions in different tissues. These effects, however, do not in themselves explain the mechanism by which a balance between synthesis and breakdown is maintained. Secondly, the fact that all cellular proteins are in a dynamic state poses questions about the relation between structure and function in tissues such as muscle and brain, which physiologists have hardly begun to tackle.

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