Deuterium
It was only in December 2019 when I first became aware that deuterium poses a significant challenge to biological organisms. Fortuitously, at that time, a professor of pediatrics at UCLA, Prof. László Boros, had reached out to me due to a paper I had published that he found of interest. That paper, which I wrote together with Dr. Gregory Nigh, a naturopath, had developed an argument for how sulfate deficiency could motivate a complex reaction cascade that takes place when the B vitamin cobalamin (B12) is deficient.
We centered the paper on the idea that sulfate supports the maintenance of gelled water (so-called “structured water”) in the glycocalyx that coats all the blood vessels in the body. We argued for an important role for the enzyme endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), particularly in the red blood cells, to produce sulfate in response to sunlight, using cobalamin as a cofactor.
We showed how sulfate deficiencies brought on by cobalamin deficiency could lead to a major adjustment of metabolic policy and ultimately explain most of the diverse symptoms of cobalamin deficiency [4]. I now believe that the gelled water, stabilized by sulfate, is also good at retaining deuterium, creating a deuterium trap that helps reduce the deuterium burden in the cells.
Prof. Boros opened my eyes for the first time to the idea that deuterium matters a lot in biology. What is deuterium? Deuterium is a heavy isotope of hydrogen, the smallest element in the periodic table. Hydrogen has just one proton and one electron; deuterium is the same except that it has, in addition, a neutron (uncharged particle that is about the same size as a proton). This makes it about twice as heavy as hydrogen, and also makes it behave differently, both biochemically and biophysically.
Hydrogen is by far the most common element in the body. Sixty two percent of the atoms in the body are hydrogen atoms. Most of these are in water molecules. Water (H2O) contains two hydrogens and one oxygen atom. Up to 60% of the body’s total weight is water, but water molecules make up nearly 99% of the body’s total molecule count.
Deuterium is a natural element, and it shows up everywhere. In seawater, only about 155 out of every million hydrogen atoms is a deuterium atom instead. But because there are so many hydrogen atoms in the body, this amounts to a significant amount of deuterium -- it is estimated to have six times as high a concentration in the blood as the mineral calcium.
Hydrogen atoms that are missing their electron are called protons (H+), and deuterium atoms without their electron are called deuterons (D+). Mitochondria are organelles inside cells that are the “energy generating factory” of the cell. They run the citric acid cycle to process nutrients like sugar into carbon dioxide and water.
The process involves pumping protons across the inner membrane of the mitochondrial wall to build up a voltage drop, and then invoking an “ATPase pump” to pump the protons back across the membrane, while simultaneously converting oxygen into water through oxidative phosphorylation.
László Boros made me keenly aware of the importance of deuterium depletion in the mitochondria. He was the lead author on a fascinating paper that explained how the cells “scrub” deuterium from nutrients that feed into the citric acid cycle in the mitochondria, and then selectively pump protons into the intermembrane space of the mitochondria while carefully avoiding pumping in deuterons [5].