P45. The conception of nitric oxide and superoxide cycles: Biomedical aspects

摘要

To construct a theory, one often needs to select the most general concept of the subject of study and its intuitively comprehensible conceptual content. In such cases, there is always a subconscious, intuitive feeling which attempts to suggest a hint that the phenomenon one is attacking is a key to something big and completely new. R. Feynman wrote at some point that we should extrapolate our knowledge into unknown areas; this is the only way for progress [1]. This is how the principle of cyclicity has emerged from analyses of metabolic cycles involving the four main atoms present in living organisms (C, N, O, and H) [2,3]. This principle made it possible to identity a general (cyclic) pattern in most various phenomena and processes that occur at practically every structural and functional level in living and nonliving matter [4,5]. Physiologists know that in order to learn how important one function or another is in an organism, one needs to switch it off and see what the consequences are. If we switched off all cyclic (or periodic) processes, then all biological rhythms would vanish, including periodic processes in the brain and in the heart. Hemoglobin would stop releasing and absorbing oxygen, blood circulation would come to a stop, as would all the pumps delivering certain ions into tissue cells and removing other ions from cells, and the heart would stop beating. All biochemical and energy transfer processes would stop, too, since enzymes operate in a cyclic mode. If all biological rhythms, all cyclic physiological and biochemical processes were switched off, life on planet Earth would come to an end. Therefore, both the topic of this discussion and the humans discussing this topic would disappear [3,4]. Consequently, cyclic organization can be identified at various structural and functional levels in living organisms, in the biosphere, and in stellar matter. This is the reason why we believe that the most important aspect in biology and the medical sciences is the question of cyclic organization. The report presents the conception of nitric oxide and superoxide radical anion cycles and discusses the biomedical aspects of these cycles. The developed concepts and their related ideas suggest, that the mechanism of cycle(s) shows naturally latent regularity and assigns a meaning to orderliness in the system of free radical compounds. By their chemical nature, the latter are well-known to tend to behave aggressively and commonly unpredictably, which frequently causes abnormalities ofvarious genesis. In the author’s opinion, the mechanism of antiradical protection of cells and the body as a whole is built into very cyclic arrangement of metabolic processes which are attended by the formation of free radicals. Failure of this cyclic mechanism may be a cause of many diseases [2–5].