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Ozone Found in the Human Body

Posted on: Thursday, 27 February 2003, 06:00 CST

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute Make Strides in Addressing Mysteries of Ozone in the Human Body

Scripps Research Institute -- La Jolla, CA. February 27, 2003—In what is a first for biology, a team of investigators at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) is reporting that the human body makes ozone.

Led by TSRI President Richard Lerner, Ph.D. and Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry Paul Wentworth, Jr, Ph.D., who made the original discovery, the team has been slowly gathering evidence over the last few years that the human body produces the reactive gas—most famous as the ultraviolet ray-absorbing component of the ozone layer—as part of a mechanism to protect it from bacteria and fungi.

"Ozone was a big surprise," says TSRI Professor Bernard Babior, M.D., Ph.D. "But it seems that biological systems manufacture ozone, and that ozone has an effect on those biological systems."

Now, in an important development in this unfolding story, Babior, Wentworth, and their TSRI colleagues report in an upcoming issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the ozone appears to be produced in a process involving human immune cells known as neutrophils and human immune proteins known as antibodies.

"It is a tremendously efficient chemical and biological process," says Wentworth, who adds that the presence of ozone in the human body may be linked to inflammation, and therefore this work may have tremendous ramifications for treating inflammatory diseases.

For the full text of this article, visit http://www.scripps.edu/news/press/022703.html

The research team continues to investigate.

The article, "Investigating antibody-catalyzed ozone generation by human neutrophils," is authored by Bernard M. Babior, Cindy Takeuchi, Julie Ruedi, Abel Gutierrez, and Paul Wentworth, Jr. The article will be available online this week at: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0530 251100, and it will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), through research grants and through a training grant; and by The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology.

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