5. A nascent iodine solution can be used to assist the body in fighting off harmful organisms. Using an iodine tonic as a throat gargle is also helpful for a cough. Iodine also acts as an expectorant of mucous from the common cold and other respiratory ailments.
Early preparations of insulin were purified quite crudely from pancreas tissue extracted from animals-either pigs or cattle. Today, insulin is mostly made biosynthetically by recombinant DNA technology or 'genetic engineering'. Until the 1980s, all insulin was extracted from the pancreases of cattle and pigs. The sequence of amino acids (the building blocks that make up the protein) is slightly different in insulins from the different species. Compared to human insulin, porcine (pork) insulin has one different amino acid and bovine (beef) insulin three different amino acids.
By Dr Ananya Mandal, MD. Insulin is a hormone that is important for metabolism and utilization of energy from the ingested nutrients - especially glucose. Insulin is a protein chain or peptide hormone. There are 51 amino acids in an insulin molecule. It has a molecular weight of 5808 Da. Insulin is produced in the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas. The name insulin comes from the Latin ''insula'' for island from the cells that produce the hormone in the pancreas.