Derek Lowe, a respected science blogger and drug discovery expert who was blogging when this writer was still working in the laboratory, today has a roundup of a concept that anyone hanging around Emory might have clued into already.

Namely, antioxidants aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Judging from the messages Gafas Ray Ban outlet to shoppers in the supermarket vitamin aisle, everybody needs more antioxidants. But evidence is accumulating that in some situations, antioxidants can be harmful: negating the adaptive effects of exercise on muscle tissue or even encouraging tumor growth, Lowe writes.

At Emory, Dean Jones has been patiently explaining for years that cells are not simply big bags with free radicals, thiols and antioxidants sloshing around indiscriminately. Instead, cells and oxidation-sensitive components are highly compartmentalized. Take for example, this recent paper in Molecular & Cellular Proteomics from Jones and Young-mi Go. Two major antioxidant systems in cells, glutathione and thioredoxin, function distinctly and independently, they show.

In a related vein, Kathy Griendling’s and David Lambeth’s labs were at the center of the discovery that reactive oxygen species are not only poisons that overflow from mitochondria, but important signals involved in many aspects of cell biology.