Talk:Reactive oxygen species

Immunity

ROS are not all bad and not always a byproduct at all. What about ROS production by NOX and DUOX enzymes and their role in immunity? This should be included! Greetings Julia

The whole "antioxidant" thing is food industry / supplement industry jive talk; note how all statements about ROS contain weasel words --- which at one time would have precluded their appearance in the hallowed webpages of Wikipedia. Oh well. But no, really, it's sooooooo retarded ---- mitochondria produce peroxides; peroxides will really mess you up (try getting some in your eye, for example!); therefore ... ROS! Antioxidants to the rescue! Buy this crap, or that crap, because it is HIGH in AntiOxidants!! It's a string of correlations with NO causation in sight. If you want to cite something to me that shows that ROS is bad and antioxidants are good, please, make it something that is in vivo; not something that is strictly in vitro and extrapolated. Thanks. Richard8081 (talk) 03:19, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Question

Does Reactive Oxygen Species increase in matrix ?

Need help ~ up for days

Thanks, v

I believe that there is a higher concentration of ROS in the mitochondrial matrix due to its proximity to the respiratory machinery. LostLucidity (talk) 16:34, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately for you, biology is not a Belief system; starting off with "I believe ..." is not a good way to introduce whatever data you do or do not wish to present. Richard8081 (talk) 16:03, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

What about plants?

This article is currently written from an animal-centric POV. ROS are produced in chloroplasts during photosynthesis and this needs mentioning. Photoinhibition has some details which could be incorporated. Smartse (talk) 15:05, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

I have added a section on singlet oxygen and its importance in plants. Boghog (talk) 14:40, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

ROS = radicals? Table of ROS

"They are highly reactive due to the presence of unpaired valence shell electrons."

I am not shure, but i do not think this is true. E.g. H₂O₂ is concidered a ROS but it is not a radical.

I think there should be a table at the begining of the article highlighting important ROS and their reactivity. Due to my crapy english I won`t change anything though..

Greetings Friedrich Uthe —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.128.132.229 (talk) 10:20, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

It's difficult to produce such a thing because there is no single agreed upon definition of a ROS. For example, H2O2 isn't actually a ROS if you use the definition of having a lone pair of electrons (i.e. a radical). It breaks down into ROS, i.e. superoxide and hydroxyl. Mostly you will see it described in scientific literature as a ROS, so most people take it is one.

However, anyone who knows hydrogen peroxide and uses it knows that it is useful as a reagent and disinfectant precisely because it doesn't act like a ROS, and is mostly called one for brevity. 90.215.125.80 (talk) 10:15, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

Helping general readers relate

ROS are known to the general public as "free radicals?" Or no?

If so, it would help readers get a handle on ROS to give the relationship in the intro.

Ocdnctx (talk) 15:13, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Something bothers me

Something bothers me about this article. Is ROS current as a scientific concept? A chemical concept, as opposed to a biological or medical one? The whole article seems subtly aimed at giving a value to them, as if they were optional or a kind of technology, rather than just describing them from a chemical standpoint. 178.38.108.161 (talk) 14:39, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

ROS as pseudo-scientific Concept got started back in the 1960s. Britton Chance was working on peroxidase and catalase in mitochondria, and noticed that there was endogenous activity. The endogenous activity was because there was some peroxide present; not much, but enough to be a baseline of enzymatic activity. Chance published that, and there was discussion in the literature of how much of this peroxide is present in normal tissue all the time. One of Chance's postdocs was a guy named Lester Packer. Lester left Chance's lab at Penn in Philadelphia and went to Berkeley. Lester started the whole Oxidant thing, about how these free radicals and peroxides cause aging -- and later how they cause other bad stuff, but aging was the linchpin of Lester becoming a BMOC. But what REALLY got to be a major Scientific -- well, pseudoscientific -- Phenomenon was Lester's invention of Anti-Oxidants. Antioxidants! Vitamin E!!! Turned out there was a lot of money in antioxidants. When I saw thirty years later that Lynda Resnik had shelled out 30 million bucks to hire some scientists to prove that her Pom Wonderful products had Antioxidants -- that's when I KNEW that Lester's grand vision had really made it BIG. Pomegranates. Jeeez. Richard8081 (talk) 16:14, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

I have added a bit more chemistry and move this up in the article. I hope this helps. Boghog (talk) 14:38, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

Sleep deprivation

Magazine article on results of observation of build up of ROS in the gut of fruit flies upon sleep deprivation, followed by death: https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-kills-20200604/ Shtove 12:46, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Glutathione

Please do not call glutathione a protein. It is a small molecule.

 Fixed Good catch. A better description is dipeptide. Boghog (talk) 09:57, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

Different order of elements in molecular formula of Hydroxyl ion.

What is the reason behind writing the formula for the Hydroxyl ion in the reverse order to that which is fairly standard in most Chemistry Textbooks? OH- is the standard form. Why have you changed it to HO- If there is a logical reason for this alteration, some mention ought to be made of it. Spyglasses (talk) 03:29, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

The formal negative charge resides on the oxygen which is signifanctly more electronegative than hydrogen. In addition, the lowest energy electronic configuration places the extra electron on the oxygen atom (see figure to the right). Hence it makes more sense that the minus charge be placed next to the oxygen atom, not the hydrogen atom. The IUPAC also follows this convention (see Rule RC-83. Anions). In addition, following the Principle of least motion the reduction reaction should probably be rewritten as:

HO-OH + e⁻ → HO⁻ + ^•OH

Boghog (talk) 09:50, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

Please add info about the positive role of ROS in exercise adaptation

See: Talk:Exercise#Please add info about reactive oxygen species to section "Mechanism of effects".

The info could be very brief here and/or go into a new section like the "Positive role of ROS in memory" one (and both could become subsections of a new section that's about, for example, ROS' "positive roles"). Prototyperspective (talk) 15:04, 29 January 2022 (UTC)