Talk:Dithiothreitol

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Chemistry Portal Dithiothreitol is within the scope of WikiProject Chemicals, a daughter project of WikiProject Chemistry, which aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of chemicals. To participate, help improve this article or visit the project page for details on the project.
Article Grading: The article has not been rated for quality and/or importance yet. Please rate the article and then leave comments here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article..

	MCB Portal This article is within the scope of the Molecular and Cellular Biology WikiProject. To participate, visit the WikiProject for more information. The current monthly improvement drive is Signal transduction.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the assessment scale.
Low	This article is on a subject of Low-importance within molecular and cellular biology.
Article Grading: The article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.

DTT should be moved from the catalyst section, since it is not actually a catalyst, but a stoichometric reagent

Go ahead and move it then. Alison Chaiken 05:11, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

done

DTT is not actually a reducing reagent. The oxidation numbers of the sulfer atoms involved in the disulfide exchange remain constant at -1. It should be more properly stated that it attacks disulfide bonds as a nucleophile.

The vast majority of the chemistry world disagrees with you. In a disulfide, you have 4 lone electron pairs on the two sulfurs, plus the 1 pair in the bond, for a total of 10 electrons (ignoring bonding to the rest of the molecule). In the two free thiols case, you still have the 4 lone pairs, plus 2 pairs in each of the bonds to hydrogen, for a total of 12 electrons. (The hydrogens come in as H+ ions, and don't bring electrons with them.) Change in electron number absolutely implies redox chemistry. As "reduction describes the gain of an electron by a molecule, atom or ion", and since the disulfide gained electrons, it has been reduced by the action of DTT. Thus DTT is a "reducing agent", by definition. -- Tmhand 19:29, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

On the image, the DTT is 2R-3R at the beginning and at the final, it is 2S-3R, please change the image!

Talk about L-DTT and D-DTT. Usually DTT is a DL-DTT racemic mixture, but it is important to do the difference.