Question 643898: nsulin is a protein that is used by the body to regulate both carbohydrate and fat metabolism. A bottle contains 525 of insulin at a concentration of 50.0 . What is the total mass of insulin in the bottle?
Answer by KMST(5328)   (Show Source):
You can put this solution on YOUR website! Your problem, as displayed, lacks units. I can only guess what the units are supposed to be. I suspect that there were symbols like  that did not come out when you cut and pasted your problem into this website. Units are very important. If your problem was supposed to be easy, the units would match, and it would be just a multiplication. If the units do not match, you would need conversion factors.
FOR EXAMPLE:
If the problem had   at   /dL,
you would need to know that 1 microliter ( ) is  
and 1 deciliter ( ) is  .
Then () = 
and (/dL) = (/ /L.
so ()(/dL) = ( )( /L)=
and the answer would be 0.2625 micrograms (0.263 micrograms when rounding according to the precision in the numbers you were given)
NOTES FROM A PHARMACEUTICAL CHEMIST (and mother of a child with type 1 diabetes):
Insulin concentration is given in international units per milliliter, usually abbreviated as U/mL. I have only seen it sold/used as a 100U/m: solution in vials of 10 mL or in smaller cartridges. That works well with the usual doses, as it would be difficult to use much more than that before too many injections and too much time could cause contamination or degradation.
Insulin is a peptide that is used by the body to regulate both carbohydrate and fat metabolism. It would not be too wrong to call it a protein, but we usually reserve the term protein for chemical compounds whose molecules contain a large number of aminoacid building blocks, and insulin molecules have about fifty aminoacids.
We really use the term insulin to refer to a few related compound and formulations. Insulin used to be made from pigs or cows, and it was chemically (very slightly) different from human insulin. Nowadays, we use recombinant human insulin, chemicallyidentical to the insulin healthy human bodies make. It is made with microbes, sort of like beer, but using conveniently modified microbes. Sometimes additives are added to that human insulin to prolong its duration of action). We also use insulin analogs, that are chemically different from natural insulin, but work much better (faster, or longer) for the diabetics who need insulin.
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