Q.State two major industrial uses of methanol, and explain the biochemical basis of methanol poisoning.

Methanol is used industrially as a solvent, as a denaturant added to ethanol to make it unfit for drinking, and as the principal feedstock for manufacturing formaldehyde (itself used to make resins and plastics) and formic acid; it is also used as a feedstock for biodiesel production. Despite its everyday industrial usefulness, methanol is genuinely toxic if ingested, because the same liver enzyme (alcohol dehydrogenase) that harmlessly processes ethanol instead oxidises methanol first to formaldehyde and then to formic acid. Formic acid causes a dangerous drop in blood pH (metabolic acidosis) and is specifically damaging to the optic nerve and retina, so methanol poisoning characteristically causes blindness in addition to its other systemic, potentially fatal effects …

Separate the two industrial uses (solvent; formaldehyde feedstock) from the toxicity mechanism (stepwise oxidation to for …

Describing methanol as directly toxic itself, rather than identifying that its metabolic breakdown products (formaldehyde, …