Today we continued our look at what happens to by-products of triacylglyceride catabolism. The topic was the degradation of fatty acids to acetyl-CoA. In order to understand the process it was necessary to learn the inner workings of a new redox system -- FAD/FADH2. The difficult issue here is that you must use both "fishhook" arrows and regular electron pair arrows as part of the same mechanism. Once over that issue, it is generally not too bad.
The last part of the degradation involved a 1,4 addition to an alpha, beta unsaturated thioester, an NADH/NAD+ oxidation and a retro-Claisen. All are things that we have seen before, it is just a matter of being able to get our hands around them in the more complicated-looking world of biomolecules.
The dog pictured came up when I did an image search for "FADH2." Perhaps that is his name.
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