Proteins are often mentioned on the show, but what about the building blocks that they consist of? This week, we’re going to tackle amino acids in our second rewind episodes. There are some topics that naturally branch off from this one, such as interactions between amino acids and how DNA encodes for different ones, but I’m going to save these topics for future rewind episodes.
Sources for this episode: 1) Thain, M., and Hickman, M. (2014), The Penguin Dictionary of Biology, 11thedition. London: Penguin Publishing Group. (p.26). 2) Campbell, N. A., Urry, L. A., Cain, M. L., Wasserman, S. A., Minorsky, P. V. and Reece, J. B. (2018), Biology: a global approach, 11th edition (Global Edition), Harlow, Pearson Education Limited: p.973. 3) Compound Interest- A Brief Guide to the Twenty Common Amino Acids (webpage). 4) Fullick A., Locke, J. and Bircher, P. (2015), A Level Biology for OCR A. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 5) Ritchie, R. and Ghent, D. (2015), A Level Chemistry for OCR A. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Side note: In case this wasn’t clear in the audio, variable groups, R groups and side chains all refer to the same functional group- namely, the variable part of an amino acid.