The second way that the mitochondria assure low deuterium contamination in their ATPase pumps is through a set of specialized enzymes that extract protons from organic molecules and deliver them to the intermembrane space. These enzymes take advantage of a unique skill of protons called proton tunneling, to carry out the reaction. Deuterons are very poor tunnelers, so they get left behind. A large class of enzymes called flavoproteins are very good at exploiting proton tunneling to select hydrogen over deuterium, and they play an essential role in keeping deuterium out of the mitochondrial water being produced by the ATPase pumps.
2 Glyphosate and Deuterium
I have argued in multiple published papers that a unique aspect of glyphosate’s insidious cumulative toxicity is its ability to get inserted into proteins by mistake in place of the coding amino acid glycine [9, 10]. Glycine is the smallest amino acid – one of the twenty or so building blocks of proteins according to the DNA code. Glyphosate is a complete glycine molecule, except that it has an extra methylphosphonate unit attached to its nitrogen atom. The enzyme that glyphosate famously disrupts in the shikimate pathway in plants has a glycine residue at the site where it binds to a phosphate anion in its substrate. Species that have a mutated form of the enzyme, with alanine replacing this glycine residue, are completely insensitive to glyphosate [11]. Once there is no glycine, there is no chance to substitute and disrupt the protein.
The flavoproteins that I mentioned above bind to phosphate-containing small molecules called flavins, and this binding is essential for them to be able to carry out proton tunneling. The site where they bind flavins contains a so-called P-loop “GxxGxG” motif - a sequence of six amino acids where there are three glycine residues and three other amino acids that could be anything (x = wildcard). Thus, these enzymes have three glycine residues that are highly susceptible to glyphosate substitution, because glyphosate can settle its methylphosphonate attachment into the spot normally reserved for the phosphate unit in the substrate. Glyphosate substitution will block flavin binding and destroy the enzyme’s ability to transfer protons.
Sulfate supplies can also be expected to be depleted by glyphosate, and this will disrupt the ability of the organism to maintain adequate amounts of gelled water. I have previously discussed multiple ways in which glyphosate would disrupt sulfate synthesis, sulfate transport, and sulfate transfer from one molecule to another [9]. An enzyme called PAPS (phosphoadenosine phosphosulfate) synthase combines a sulfate anion with ATP to produce the activated form of sulfate that can then be attached to the glycocalyx. PAPS synthase has a GxxGxG motif at the ATP binding site, and is therefore vulnerable to glyphosate’s mischief.
3 Bradykinin Storm
Although COVID-19 is a new disease, there have already been hundreds of papers published describing the unique aspects of this disease. One of the most interesting ones to me is a paper that used computational techniques to analyze “gene expression data from cells in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) from COVID-19 patients that were used to sequence the virus.” [12] Their technique allowed them to determine which proteins were upregulated (overexpressed) in the alveoli in the lungs of the infected patients. Bronchoalveolar lavage is a medical procedure in which a small amount of fluid (BALF) is squirted into the lung via a bronchoscope and then recollected for analysis.