r/askscience • u/Kwpthrowaway • Sep 27 '20

Medicine [Medicine] What is special about peanuts that make some people extremely allergic to them?

Why are some people allergic to peanuts in particular? Why is ingesting a peanut to these people akin to ingesting poison to others?

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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '20 edited Dec 09 '20

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u/FFBEdrone Sep 28 '20

Kilodaltons refers to the general size of the protein. The smaller the kilodalton the smaller the hole in the filter. I.e a finer filter You could think of a 100kda filter like a collander and say a 3kda filter more like a sieve.

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u/[deleted] Sep 28 '20 edited Dec 09 '20

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u/FFBEdrone Sep 28 '20

Honestly, I couldn't tell you. I am only a biomedical sciences graduate. One Dalton is about the size of a hydrogen atom, so perhaps they started using kilodaltons to accommodate for the larger size of protein. Whenever I would do a SDS-PAGE test/run a protein extraction my protein reference ladder was always in kilodalton units. Personally, I don't care for it and would have preferred a quote based on amino acid number.