Amino Acids continued!

It's been a busy few weeks! I've subbed half of the week days in the past 2 weeks, and worked ~30 hours at Blockbuster each week. They've told us that our store is closing, and we've had to convert the store over to liquidation mode. It's utter chaos. Confusion abound! But I figured I'd take my one day off in the foreseeable future to continue in the vein of the last post.

Since Valentine's day has just passed, and I'm still *technically* single, I did what I do every year.....wait until the big boxes of chocolate go on sale, and buy myself some!

Why do I mention this?

Well I noticed that the inside looks eerily like what I was about to teach....Tertiary Structure!

My (almost completely demolished) box of chocolates

So Imagine this heart shaped container is a protein. And consider the squarish ones the beta-pleated sheets, and the roundish ones alpha-helixes. See how they kind of touch? They are all squished together to form the bigger whole. The little gold spaces in between are the interractions between our alpha helixes and beta pleated sheets! A.K.A. disulfide bonds!

Quaternary structure

Now imagine you go to buy yourself some clearance self-pity valentines chocolates. We all know how they're set up in the store. These hearts are  arranged so that they're sat up, with the points facing down, each snuggled into a base, lined up front to back. Lets call each of these individual heart boxes a sub-unit. (in technical speak, a polypeptide chain).

What do you get when you have an entire row of subunits?  If you work in retail like me, you often have to unpack these crates from the manufacturer, and they're wrapped in plastic wrap. So taking the plastic wrap around the subunits, all snug together, you get Quaternary structure! You've got a full display, the whole shebang, all parts have come together to form a beautiful mountain range of chocolate.

And there you go. You just built a whole protein from tiny alphabet-like pieces (aka amino acids).

An example of this whole aggregate structure is Hemoglobin. Hemoglobin consists of two kinds of polypeptide chains. It has alpha helixes, and a few non-helical segments connecting them. See all the curly alpha helixes above?




Now I don't have a whole heap of time to go into Nucleic Acids today, but I'll try to get to that soon. I'm subbing tomorrow, and then have work at the Block tomorrow, Sat, and Sun, so don't expect any miracles!

Until then,

Ms. Kat