Skip to main content

Trimethylamine (TMA) and the smell of fish



The typical smell of (dead) fish is based on a chemical compound called trimethylamine (TMA).
Fish do use it in the regulation of their metabolism during pressure changes.

For humans there is a body odor disease known as trimethylaminuria (TMAU)

This desease has two types. 

The first type is based in a defect of the FMO3 enzyme found in the human liver metabolism and people affected by that do emit a fishy odor.

The second type is different. Patients with the type 2 pattern show an overload of the FMO3 enzyme caused by a largely increased TMA synthesis in the small intestinal tract.
The research in the last decade assumed a kind of wrong type of bacteria in the gut, which would produce large amounts of TMA just by introducing them into the intestinal tract.

This assumption seems to be incorrect. 
Todays view shifts currently. It is very likely that a permanent malabsorption of choline and betaine is the cause of the altered bacterial metabolism activity.

More interestingly most of the TMAU sufferers do have other dominant smell types than fishy. The most stated type of smell was a fecal smell.





Labels:

Comments

  1. Mahbuba IslamJune 10, 2020 at 12:06 PM

    Paperperhour research paper topics is one of the great way for research on any subject. It provides 1000+ research topic ideas for students. If you're looking a team, who will help you to writing a research paper, then please check out this website.

    ReplyDelete
  2. health careJune 22, 2020 at 4:16 AM

    Thanks for sharing such beautiful information with us.Recovering after Lower Body Lift Surgery

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Glutamine and Glutamate seems to increase butyrate production in the large intestinal tract

Glutamine and its counterpart glutamate seems to increase the butyrate production in the intestinal tract. Butyrates show a biting or pungeant, light sweat like smell. This strengthens the view that the tight junction sealing is dominated by metabolite pathways that present in one or the other way highly smelling chemical compounds the body is forced to absorb to counter regulate its deregulated energy metabolism in the intestinal tract .
3 comments
Read more

Candida pathogenesis in Bromhidrosis

Our observation was that bromhidrosis patients reported slight elevated candida sp. levels in combination mit reduced enterococcus sp. in stool analysis results. The current metabolism impact for bromhidrosis seems to be sourced in a deficient acetate or propionate degrading enzyme which is part of the major ethanol degradation. The biosynthesis of ethanol is mostly based on candida sp., so we investigated into the pathogenesis of candida. The following pictures show the resulting disease model. In the case of an deficiency in the ethanol degradation pathway, the immune system shows a weakness regarding the candida sp., which shifts the microbiome towards increased candida occurence and activity. This would lead to small intestinal fungal overgrowth (SIFO) symptoms 
5 comments
Read more

The fecal body odor smell type

As stated in an earlier post, the most prominent reported smell type for TMAU2 patients was the fecal smell type. But not only TMAU positive patients reported such a type of smell, another body odor sufferer type do show the same fecal body odor pattern. Interestingly nearly all of those non TMAU patients report having Irritable Bowel Syndrom (IBS) as well. We took a closer look into the combined bacterial and human metabolism. The central chemical compound involved in the fecal smell seems to be indole. Indole is produced within the bacterial metabolism as a precursor of tryptophan. As major source the bacteria use glycolysis based on sugar, carbohydrates, ... To let the bacteria produce too much indole we found certain criteria: - Tryptophan absorption of the intestinal cells is lower than the serine and glycine absorption - Histidine malabsorption is present - Tyrosine malabsorption is present Why do TMAU2 patients now show a fecal smell, don't they have a choline and ...
1 comment
Read more