Amino Acid Biosynthesis
Essential and Nonessential Amino Acids
Nonessential amino acids are those that are synthesized by mammals, while the essential amino acids must be obtained from dietary sources. Why would an organism evolve in such a way that it could not exist in the absence of certain amino acids? Most likely, the ready availability of these amino acids in lower organisms (plants and microorganisms) obviated the need for the higher organism to continue to produce them. The pathways for their synthesis were selected out. Not having to synthesize an additional ten amino acids (and regulate their synthesis) represents a major economy, then. Nevertheless, it remains for us to become familiar with the synthetic pathways for these essential amino acids in plants and microorganisms, and it turns out that they are generally more complicated that the pathways for nonessential amino acid synthesis and they are also species-specific.
The twenty amino acids can be divided into two groups of 10 amino acids. Ten are essential and 10 are nonessential. However, this is really not an accurate dichotomy, as there is overlap between the two groups, as is indicated in the text accompanying the following two charts: