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Gene regulation

One man's food

Nature volume 407, pages 852–853 (2000)Cite this article

Since early in our evolution, we have been creating unnatural molecules — from cooked foods to food additives, drugs to building materials — with the intention of improving our environment and well-being. These 'xenobiotics' can be ingested in food, air or water, either intentionally (in the case of food or drugs) or unintentionally. Hydrophobic xenobiotics are converted into fat-soluble molecules in the liver by enzymes of the 'cytochrome P450' family1. This process detoxifies harmful xenobiotics, but has drawbacks — it can deactivate therapeutic drugs and convert xenobiotics that are not intrinsically dangerous into toxins or carcinogens. From a therapeutic standpoint, there is another problem: the activation of the conversion enzymes by one xenobiotic often increases the metabolism of other compounds, making it hard to predict what effects drugs may have.

Not surprisingly, there is a lot of interest in understanding how xenobiotics kick- start the conversion process. Wei et al. and Xie et al., writing on page 920 of this issue2 and in a recent issue of Nature3, respectively, have been probing this process, with some interesting outcomes. One of these is the production of a 'humanized' mouse model that might be useful for testing the effects of drugs.

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Figure 1: Unravelling the basis of drug toxicity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Endocrinology Diabetes and Metabolism, Departments of Medicine and Genetics and The Penn Diabetes Center, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, 19104, Pennsylvania, USA

    Mitchell A. Lazar

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  1. Mitchell A. Lazar
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Correspondence to Mitchell A. Lazar.

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Lazar, M. One man's food. Nature 407, 852–853 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35038199

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