Dominic D'Agostino

So you could, I mean, maybe analogous.

Yeah, there's a lot of racemic compounds.

So statins, Adderall, ibuprofen.

So these are all racemic mixtures of the same molecule.

So racemic beta-hydroxybutyrate, you have the D. The D beta-hydroxybutyrate gets metabolized like very, very fast.

So it gets in your system, your tissues suck it up, you metabolize it.

Your body makes very small amounts of L-beta-hydroxybutyrate with a racemase enzyme.

That racemase enzyme is not in the liver, but it's in the tissues.

That's very interesting because I think some tissues are converting D to L to maybe use the L-beta-hydroxybutyrate as a signaling, but I'm just speculating.

But nonetheless, you have D gets metabolized very quickly, and then the L is like a timed release version of beta-hydroxybutyrate.

That's how I've always thought about it.

Brianna Stubbs did some nice work looking at the D to L, and we've done quite a bit of work on the D and the L, and a lot of work with racemic compounds.

So the L will get metabolized three or four times slower, and you get about 20% conversion of the L back to D, but it's a very slow process.

The advantage of taking the D to L or the racemic, when you consume a racemic mixture, the ketones elevate and stay elevated quite a bit longer.

I think of the L-beta-hydroxybutyrate as an important signaling molecule because you get higher concentrations of L in the brain.

So if you give someone racemic beta-hydroxybutyrate,

and then you pull out the heart and you take samples of the brain out, the levels of L-beta-hydroxybutyrate are going to be quite a bit higher.

It metabolizes slower.

So this is important.

We think this is important because the L-beta-hydroxybutyrate probably does not have, definitely does not have the same energetic potential in regards to generating ATP.