Multiple Digestive Enzymes

Conservation of digestive enzymes.

The traditional understanding is that an entirely new complement of digestive enzymes is secreted by the pancreas into the small intestines with each meal. This is thought to be necessary because, like food itself, these enzymes are degraded during digestion. In this review we discuss experiments that bring this point of view into question. They suggest that digestive enzymes can be absorbed in...

Making Sense of Digestive Enzymes

Enzymes are functional proteins essential to all living systems. In humans, enzymes act as catalysts for numerous chemical reactions including the digestion of dietary macronutrients. In the early part of the twentieth century, use of supplemental digestive enzymes was proposed as a means of compensating for the loss of enzyme activity in modern diets. As with the loss of micronutrients like vi...

Digestive Enzymes in Marine Species

The proteolytic activities of the digestive tract of three carnivorous fish species (Sebastes mentella, Scophthalmus maximus, Sparus aurata) have been studied. The activity found in the stomach showed a pH optimum of 2.0 for all species, whereas this was in the alkaline range (9.5-10.0) in the intestinal extracts. Similar optimal temperature was measured for all species, although higher residua...

Digestive enzymes in the germ-free animal.

The digestive physiology of the germ-free animal has a number of characteristics (cecal hypertrophy, slower small intestine cell renewal, slower gastric emptying and intestinal transit) which distinguish it from that of the conventional animal. If the germ-free model is to be used to determine the role of gastrointestinal microflora in the nutrition of the conventional animal, it is essential t...

The Digestive Enzymes of the Onychophora