User Contributed Dictionary
Noun
Synonyms
Extensive Definition
A thiophosphate is a chemical structure
containing phosphorus
bonded to one or more sulfur atoms and zero or more
oxygen atoms; the name is
used to refer to both the PS4 group and the PO3S group.
A number of insecticides, such as
diazinon, have
thiophosphate groups.
Thiophosphate (PS4) is occasionally used as a
ligand with zinc in
inorganic chemistry; it is used as a competitive
inhibitor for phosphate in studying ATP
binding, and nucleic acid
with some of the phosphate groups replaced with thiophosphate
(PO3S) is sometimes synthesised as part of a
substitution interference assay to determine which phosphate
groups are important for formation of the correct function of a
ribozyme.
Thiophosphate-substituted nucleic acid is also used in experiments
to determine how transcriptase
reacts to oddities in its input nucleic acid sequence.