The actual shape they end up taking is what determines what that protein actually does, whether that is teaming up with other proteins to pull something together (muscle proteins), allowing water to passively come in and out (aquaporins in your kidneys), or even acting as a sturdy structural element (keratin, in hair, skin, and nails). It starts to bend, buckle, and bunch up to form complex blobs and shapes. The entire thing gets pretty long, and the backbone folds. Protein chains aren’t straight, rigid noodles, of course. They ride on a long chain of railcars using the same set of wheels and chassis for the tracks, but each railcar looks different depending on what it's carrying. Think of sidechains like different types of cargo on a long train. These ‘LEGO bricks’ (moleculego bricks, if you would) all share a main core that serves as the ‘backbone’ of the chain while each type of amino acid has a different ‘sidechain’ that branches off the chain to give it different properties, such as bulkiness or water affinity. Frizzle’s school bus or Bill Nye’s production crew, but I’ll do my best here.Īt their most fundamental level (and oversimplified for clarity), proteins are long chains of little molecules called amino acids.
To explain this properly enough, we’re going to have to take a quick dive into the molecular world. While that keeps me plenty busy, I still wear quite a lot of different hats thanks to my wide ADHD-fueled interest base, and as such I’m freelance writing with Vite for this blog post! More about myself after the rest of this post, which I hope you’ll find useful and, dare I say, somewhat entertaining. Apart from being the main thing you think of when it comes to building muscle, they’re pretty much responsible for everything else going on in the body, as well as in other living things too! But if you’re not a vegetarian or bodybuilder with good reasons to know about what protein you eat, you might be surprised to know that not all protein in food is created equal…īefore we continue, a brief introduction since Tim isn’t actually writing this post! My name is Patrick, and I’m currently a PharmD candidate at California Northstate University working as an intern pharmacist between my studies. Proteins do quite a bit (and even that’s a big understatement).
0 kommentar(er)
