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Teasing out the truth about collagen

Michael J. Rennie

Of all of the non-mineral constituents of the mammalian body there is more collagen than anything else except water and possibly fat. Nevertheless our understanding of the physiology of collagen is rudimentary.
All cells and tissues are supported by a network of collagen fibres, the arrangement of which appears to be specifically site adaptive. We know a lot about the biochemistry of collagen, and its many subtypes: for example, all collagen molecules are made within fibroblasts (or modifications of them such as osteocytes), then the oversized collagen molecule is secreted in a soluble form, with hydrophilic ends which are enzymatically cleaved to leave the insoluble core collagen (tropocollagen) beached in the extracellular space. We know that collagen is made relatively immortal by being cross-linked and rather impervious to proteolysis. However, we do not know much about what governs collagen synthesis or its breakdown in the human body. It is important to know, not simply because like Everest, collagen presents a large un-ignorable mass. We need to understand collagen metabolism in order to understand how we grow, adapt to the environment, maintain our adult shapes and then wrinkle and crumble as we age. Collagen diseases are relatively common and almost certainly if we knew more about how, for example, the collagen framework of bone is laid down and turned over we would understand much more about osteopenia of old age.