15 Facts About Glycine

Glycine is an amino acid that has a single hydrogen atom as its side chain.

Glycine is integral to the formation of alpha-helices in secondary protein structure due to its compact form.

Glycine is an inhibitory neurotransmitter – interference with its release within the spinal cord can cause spastic paralysis due to uninhibited muscle contraction.

Glycine was discovered in 1820 by the French chemist Henri Braconnot when he hydrolyzed gelatin by boiling it with sulfuric acid.

Glycine originally called it "sugar of gelatin", but the French chemist Jean-Baptiste Boussingault showed that it contained nitrogen.

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Glycine is cogenerated as an impurity in the synthesis of EDTA, arising from reactions of the ammonia coproduct.

Glycine is not essential to the human diet, as it is biosynthesized in the body from the amino acid serine, which is in turn derived from 3-phosphoglycerate, but the metabolic capacity for glycine biosynthesis does not satisfy the need for collagen synthesis.

Glycine is extremely sensitive to antibiotics which target folate, and blood glycine levels drop severely within a minute of antibiotic injections.

Glycine is an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system, especially in the spinal cord, brainstem, and retina.

Glycine is a required co-agonist along with glutamate for NMDA receptors.

Glycine is not widely used in foods for its nutritional value, except in infusions.

Glycine is an intermediate in the synthesis of a variety of chemical products.

Glycine is a significant component of some solutions used in the SDS-PAGE method of protein analysis.

Glycine is used to remove protein-labeling antibodies from Western blot membranes to enable the probing of numerous proteins of interest from SDS-PAGE gel.

Glycine had previously been identified in the Murchison meteorite in 1970.