Comparison of glutathione peroxidase-1 in free divers with their counterparts: A model study for sports informatics

Free diving is a popular sport because of many features such as sustainability, eco-friendly and challenges to nature. Due to increased interest in recent years, the number of competitions is also increasing gradually. On the other hand, scientific reports on the understanding of longer breath-holding mechanisms and metabolisms are still unclear. To provide contributions on this phenomenon, glutathione peroxidase was selected as a model enzyme because of its critical importance in breath-holding. The enzymes from both human and free diving animals were compared by using bioinformatics tools such as ProtParam, Swiss-Model, Clustal Omega and the results are discussed in the present paper. In conclusion, the specific amino acid sequences can be considered in the selection of elite free divers for international competitions to get the best results. However, it should be noted that special training methods should also be applied to have better breath-holding capacities.