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Protein structure is the three-dimensional arrangement of atoms in an amino acid-chain molecule. Proteins are polymers – specifically polypeptides – formed from sequences of amino acids, which are the monomers of the polymer. A single amino acid monomer may also be called a residue, which indicates a repeating unit of a polymer.
[1] [2] A polypeptide is a longer, continuous, unbranched peptide chain. [3] Polypeptides that have a molecular mass of 10,000 Da or more are called proteins. [4] Chains of fewer than twenty amino acids are called oligopeptides, and include dipeptides, tripeptides, and tetrapeptides.
Beginning in 1957, Vernon Ingram and others showed through electrophoresis and 2D chromatography that genetic variations in proteins (such as sickle cell hemoglobin) could be limited to differences in just a single polypeptide chain in a multimeric protein, leading to a "one gene–one polypeptide" hypothesis instead. [12]
The words protein, polypeptide, and peptide are a little ambiguous and can overlap in meaning. Protein is generally used to refer to the complete biological molecule in a stable conformation, whereas peptide is generally reserved for a short amino acid oligomers often lacking a stable 3D structure. But the boundary between the two is not well ...
The primary structure of a biopolymer is the exact specification of its atomic composition and the chemical bonds connecting those atoms (including stereochemistry).For a typical unbranched, un-crosslinked biopolymer (such as a molecule of a typical intracellular protein, or of DNA or RNA), the primary structure is equivalent to specifying the sequence of its monomeric subunits, such as amino ...
(The tertiary structure of a protein consists of the way a polypeptide is formed of a complex molecular shape. This is caused by R-group interactions such as ionic and hydrogen bonds, disulphide bridges, and hydrophobic & hydrophilic interactions. Protein tertiary structure is the three-dimensional shape of a protein.
Many proteins produced within the cell are secreted outside the cell to function as extracellular proteins. Extracellular proteins are exposed to a wide variety of conditions. To stabilize the 3D protein structure, covalent bonds are formed either within the protein or between the different polypeptide chains in the quaternary structure.
Permutation by duplication occurs when a gene undergoes duplication to form a tandem repeat, before redundant sections of the protein are removed; this relationship is found between saposin and swaposin. Fission and fusion occurs when partial proteins fuse to form a single polypeptide, such as in nicotinamide nucleotide transhydrogenases.