How is more important than What! -- Interview with Jonathan Coloff about Glutamate usage during function vs. proliferation!!

Cells perform their function: like heart muscle makes the heart beat or beta-cells maintain blood glucose by secreting insulin. This demands energy and resources to accomplish that. Many times, the same cells need to increase their numbers to meet the body's every changing demands. Like beta-cells multiple in cases of obesity. Cell division is also an energetically costly process. It has to make two of almost everything: two sets of DNA, two times the mitochrondria, before dividing into two. How does the cell balance the resources between its function and cell division processes?? 

Jonathan Coloff and colleagues asked the same and found that the answer does not lie in different starting material, but how the raw materials are processed. A cell's carbon demands can be satisfied by glucose, but nitrogen comes mostly from glutamate; which helps build nuclei acids, proteins and other machinery. Quiescent cells performing normal function process glutamate to ammonia vs. proliferative cells that would make non-essential amino acids from it. This difference in processing describes the switch between the two cellular states. To learn more about the switch, please listen to Jon.

To know more about the study, please refer to:

Differential Glutamate Metabolism in Proliferating and Quiescent Mammary Epithelial Cells
Jonathan L. Coloff et al., Cell Metabolism. May 2016.