Amino Acids

in this video, we're going to talk some more details about amino acids now. Amino acids recall from our last lesson video are really just the monomers of proteins. And so linking together multiple amino acids allows us to build a protein polymer. Now each individual amino acid monomer is going to contain common components that are common to all amino acids. And then they're also going to contain some unique components, such as the unique our group, and we'll be able to see the common components in the unique our group down below once we get to our image. But living organisms, they primarily used a total of 20 different amino acids, and once again, these different amino acids. They all have common components that we're gonna talk about. But each of the 20 amino acids also has a unique, so each has a unique our group. So let's take a look at our example down below to get a better understanding of these ideas. So we're taking a look at the amino acid structure, and so over here on the left, what we have is a table of the amino acid components, and so recall in our last lesson video. We were representing amino acids using these circles. And so these circles, each of these circles has, uh, these components that we're talking about and these components you can see over here in a more detailed chemical structure of the amino acid. So each of these amino acids is going to have common components, which we have in the red box. So the red dotted box that you see here represent the common components that are found in all 20 of the different amino acids and down below. What you'll see is a green shading, which is gonna be the unique region of the amino acid that will differ between all of these 20 amino acids. So when we look at the common components, notice that it starts with the central carbon atom, which is also known as the Alfa Carbon. And so over here, when we look at the chemical structure, you can see that the central carbon atom is right here in the center, right in the middle. Now coming up off the top of the central carbon atom, we have a central hydrogen atom s O. That would be this hydrogen atom that we see here and again. This is a common component found in all amino acids and then going to the left and going to the right of the central carbon atom. We have these two functional groups that you should recognize. So going to the left over here in blue, what we have is an amino group, which is where the end terminal end would be for this amino acids. And then, of course, going to the right Over here in yellow, what we have is a car box Aled Group, which is going to be the C terminal end of the amino acid. And so once again, all of these components that we talked about here are the common components found in every single amino acids. And really, what makes one amino acid different from another amino acid is going to be the our group, the unique our group. And so we can put the our group here and the our group. You can pretty much think that the R stands for the R and the rest of the molecule because the our group is going to be variable. It will change from amino acid, two amino acid, and it represents the rest of the molecule. Some amino acids have a really, really small our group with just ah handful of atoms, just maybe one. Adam sometimes and other amino acids have our groups that are much, much larger in size and have many, many mawr atoms, and they're much, much more complicated. But the backbone this region here is going to be common for all amino acids, so that's important to keep in mind now for your biology class, you're likely not going to need to know all 20 of the different amino acids, but you will need to know that there are 20 and you will need to know the common components and the fact that they all have a unique our group that has different properties. And so this year concludes our introduction to amino acids, and we'll be able to get some practice applying these concepts as we move forward in our course. So I'll see you guys in our next video