Why Pregnant Women Shouldn’t Drink
There are a couple of neat papers from PNAS that came out recently, but this one was quite neat:
An alcohol binding site on the neural cell adhesion molecule L1
It’s kind of weird to think of ethanol as being a specific ligand to a protein. After all, it’s a solvent, right? Well, turns out that there are spots in brain proteins that bind ethanol (and similar alcohols), and one of them is in the neural protein L1. When ethanol binds there in fetuses, it can cause big problems for their neural development. There’s some neat biochemistry and pharmacology in this paper.
