Protien Lesson Plan

PROTEIN

Lesson 1

All material designated for higher level only is presented in italics

|Syllabus content to be covered: |
| |
|Composition |
|Basic structure of amino acids |
|Essential amino acids, peptides, peptide bond, hydrolysis |

Composition

Basic Structure of Amino Acids

The protein molecule has a large complex structure. Each molecule is made up of smaller units called amino acids. Amino acids are the building blocks of the protein molecule.
Amino acids are relatively small molecules. They are water-soluble and consequently can easily diffuse through the walls of the intestine.

There are 20 common amino acids. These are arranged like beads in a necklace in many different sequences to form proteins. The number of amino acids and the sequence in which they are arranged results in the formation of particular proteins. It is not altogether unlike how words are formed from the alphabet. There are a huge number of words that can be formed from the 26 letters of the alphabet. Depending on how you sequence the letters and how many letters you use you get different words. Likewise there are many different proteins that can be formed from the 20 common amino acids. In fact even simple proteins contain quite a number of amino acids e.g. insulin (protein) is made up of approx 50 amino acids. Haemoglobin has 500 and urease (protein in soya beans) has over 4500 amino acids.

All amino acids have the same basic structure. They all