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My name is Martin Brand and I'm going to talk about Respiration,
Reactive Oxygen Species and Uncoupling Proteins and I'll do this using examples from
work done on my own laboratory to try and give an impression
of where the field is and perhaps, where it's going.
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I'll divide my talk into two parts.
In the first part,
I'm going talk about Reactive Oxygen Species production by mitochondria.
First of all, I'll talk about ageing,
then I'll talk about the topology and sites
of ROS production in the electron transport chain,
and then move on to look at regulation of ROS production by mild uncoupling.
In the second part,
I will consider uncoupling of mitochondria by uncoupling proteins, UCPs.
First of all, I'll talk about ROS activation of UCPs,
and then I'll say something about the evidence that this activation of UCPs
by ROS acts to attenuate ROS production by mitochondria.
So first of all,
Reactive Oxygen Species production by
mitochondria and what that may have to do with ageing.
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This is a self-portrait of Rembrandt,
painted in 1628, when he was 22 years old.
If he was still alive today,
he'd be just passing his 400th birthday and I think it's a reasonable thing to ask,
why isn't he still here today?
Well, the portrait on the right,
is painted 33 years later,
and you can see that he's aged dramatically and of course,
that's why he's not here today,
because 400 years of ageing would be impossible for any human to take.
So he's aged and we're all aging, and what's going on?
Well, best theory to explain it is the Mitochondrial free radical theory
of ageing which suggests that mitochondrial free radicals,
reactive oxygen species, are being produced
all the time in our bodies and they're killing us,
so we age and die as a result.
The cells in Rembrandt,
