PLP, an outstanding molecule

Today we started to look at the transformations of amino acids. The first step was to begin an analysis of the chemistry of PLP, a co-enzyme used in a large number of the reactions. The key concept here is that PLP is essentially an electron sink and can generate two different imines. These imines will give different C=O compounds upon hydrolysis. If we are clever about manipulating the PLP adducts we can force the amino acids to undergo a wide variety of changes.