#bilirubin — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #bilirubin, aggregated by home.social.
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We’ve finally found out what makes #urine yellow it comes from #bacteria metabolizing waste from #redbloodcells
#Bilirubin is orange pigment released by red #bloodcells after they die. Gut microbes use bilirubin reductase to break down bilirubin into colorless urobilinogen, which degrades into yellowish #urobilin, giving urine that infamous hue. While urobilin previously had an association with color of urine, enzyme that starts process producing urobilinogen was unknown.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/gotta-go-weve-finally-found-out-what-makes-urine-yellow/ -
"Here we used biochemical analyses and comparative genomics to identify BilR as a gut-microbiota-derived bilirubin reductase that reduces #bilirubin to #urobilinogen. We delineated the BilR sequences from similar reductases through the identification of key residues critical for bilirubin reduction and found that BilR is predominantly encoded by #Firmicutes species."