Glycine, Molecular Biology Reagent

Glycine is a non-essential amino acid. It is the only amino acid with no asymmetric carbon and thus is not chiral. It is the major inhibitory neurotransmitter. It is involved in the biosynthesis of the porphyrin rings of hemes and chlorophylls.

Glycine is commonly used in buffer solutions, in electrophoresis and preparative chromatography. A study of the folding of monoclonal antibodies in the presence of glycine and their subsequent purification has been published. The use of glycine in the purification of lipopolysaccharides, lipooligosaccharides, and lipid A has been reported. It is an amino acid for use in cell culture media development applications and existing media formulations. Glycine is commonly used as a component in Tris-glycine and Tris-glycine-SDS running buffers for polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, a component of Towbin's transfer buffer for Western blots, a buffer substance in cryoenzymology, in osmotic pressure maintenance in isoelectric focusing of erythrocytes, salting-in effect in protein chemistry, and as a buffer component in the coupled phosphatase-kinase reaction for end labelling of restriction fragments. The growth requirements of various microorganisms is reported in the Handbook of Microbiology.

Glycine is a non-chiral amino acid that can be synthesized in the body from the amino acid serine by Serine Hydroxymethyltransferase. Inhibitory neurotransmitter in spinal cord, allosteric regulator of NMDA receptors.