Talk:Bile acid

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Bile salts
I disagree when it says that bile acid is the same as bile salts: only primary bile acids are bile salts, secondary bile acids are not. Could someone who knows more modify the article ? Tiphaine800 (talk) 14:46, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

The article is disjointed and does not explain the distinction between bile acids, bile salts, conjucated and non-conjugated bile salts. The information is there by not organized well. Mention should be made of what are the primary bile salts and the secondary bile salts. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.221.135.162 (talk) 02:57, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I believe I've rectified both of these issues. mcs (talk) 20:44, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

Normally, an acid is an anion (negatively charged ion) plus enough H+ to balance the electric charge, whereas a salt is an anion plus any other cation (positively charged ion, the most relevant here being Na+ and Ca2+. I think it's the same with bile acids and bile salts, so you could have both conjugated and unconjugated bile acids, and both conjugated and unconjugated bile salts, regardless of whether they're primary or secondary, depending only on whether you're talking about the anion and assuming there's just an H+ to balance the charge, or whether you're talking about it in the context of whatever cations are present.  But I'm not changing the article without checking sources.  --Dan Wylie-Sears 2 (talk) 00:24, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Well, I found a couple of pages that sound as though the term "bile salt" does mean conjugated bile acid. I looked at the actual structures in a gastroinestinal physiology textbook, and they're definitely still acids.  Logically, they shouldn't be called salts (except in the context of a solution or crystal where there's a cation other than H+), but maybe they are. --Dan Wylie-Sears 2 (talk) 23:23, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks for checking this. The pKa of these bile acids is different when they are conjugated with glycine/taurine. This means that in the duodenum the conjugated forms are usually anionic "salts" and have a hydrophilic face and a hydrophobic face, making them better michelle-forming detergents. The unconjugated forms are protonated "acids". See the section under primary bile acids and in particular ref 9 (and other work by Hofmann and colleagues). This convention has been used since the 1960's but in practice the terms are used interchangeably.Jrfw51 (talk) 13:56, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

Completed merger with Bile acid synthesis
Just completed merging Bile acid synthesis into this article. There was very little information in that article that was not redundant with info in this article, but I did copy-paste over one sentence, and I moved over another fact, which I paraphrased to make it consistent with my source. Not sure how long the period of silence on the merger was (merge tag was dated April 2012), but it seemed pretty clearly justified to me. mcs (talk) 20:48, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

bile acids can cause scratching?Big bahram (talk) 14:43, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Eighty percent?
This article states that "In humans, taurocholic acid and glycocholic acid (derivatives of cholic acid) and taurochenodeoxycholic acid and glycochenodeoxycholic acid (derivatives of chenodeoxycholic acid) represent approximately 80% of all bile salts in bile whereas the cholic acid article states "Of the two major bile acids, cholate derivatives represent approximately eighty percent of all bile acids." These statements cannot both be true.


 * Well spotted. Needs some more editing to be clear which bile acids predominate in which species.Jrfw51 (talk) 18:47, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Bio 401 Cell Biology with lab F2022
— Assignment last updated by Apelk003 (talk) 18:06, 14 October 2022 (UTC)