Issue 263 / November 2023
Hot
The further south and east you go, the spicier food tends to get. A spice many of us store in the kitchen cupboard are chili peppers. Fresh or dried, crushed or finely sliced and thrown into a sauce, chili peppers can set your palate on fire to varying degrees. It has to do with the amount you fling in, but also the kind of pepper you choose to chop. The substance that sparks off the well-known mixture of burn and sometimes pain is known as capsaicin - and the sensation of pain is exactly what we are supposed to feel. Chili peppers do not produce capsaicin for human pleasure and cuisine; they make it to ward off predators. No other mammal would dream of adding hot pepper to its meal! Not all peppers are pungent, however. Take bell peppers, for example. Do they produce capsaicin? No. Instead, they produce what is known as capsiate, which is not hot. Both capsaicin and capsiate are derived from the same pathways but, at the very last steps, a vanillin substrate is modified in either one of two ways. The resulting product is capsiate or capsaicin - both of which, surprisingly, are synthesized by the same enzyme, a synthase known as PUN1.
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Protein Spotlight (ISSN 1424-4721) is a monthly review written by the
Swiss-Prot team of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
Spotlight articles describe a specific protein or family of proteins on an informal tone. |