Description

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🩸You basically have to recycle your entire blood supply every three months and rebuild it from scratch. This is wild enough, but you actually have to basically DOUBLE the pace you’re recycling and rebuilding your red blood cells the MOMENT you’re born, which leads to SO MANY interesting issues at the biochemical level.



Not only that, but we don’t actually finish recycling our blood proteins ourselves. One of the most important byproducts of this process is a potentially dangerous pigment called Bilirubin.



🦠 Incredibly, we rely on our microbiome to metabolize bilirubin. If they don’t, we can get hit by all sorts of issues like jaundice, which is especially problematic when we’re infants. Let’s explore this wild story at the heart of your metabolism.



💻 Rendered using @BradyJohnston ‘s open-source Molecular Nodes Add-on for Blender: https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/molecularnodes/



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📚Primary Works Cited:



Hall, B., Levy, S., Dufault-Thompson, K. et al. BilR is a gut microbial enzyme that reduces bilirubin to urobilinogen. Nat Microbiol 9, 173–184 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-023-01549-x



Vítek, L. Bilirubin: translational perspectives. Pediatr Res (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41390-025-04432-z



Kawade N, Onishi S. The prenatal and postnatal development of UDP-glucuronyltransferase activity towards bilirubin and the effect of premature birth on this activity in the human liver. Biochem J. 1981 Apr 15;196(1):257-60. doi: 10.1042/bj1960257. PMID: 6796071; PMCID: PMC1162989.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1162989/



Sankaran VG, Orkin SH. The switch from fetal to adult hemoglobin. Cold Spring Harb Perspect Med. 2013 Jan 1;3(1):a011643. doi: 10.1101/cshperspect.a011643. PMID: 23209159; PMCID: PMC3530042.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3530042/



Ziberna, L., Martelanc, M., Franko, M. et al. Bilirubin is an Endogenous Antioxidant in Human Vascular Endothelial Cells. Sci Rep 6, 29240 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep29240



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