5 Protein-Related Terms

So as you guys air reading through your textbooks or sitting in class listening to your professors, you might hear these five protein related terms just tossed around and used all the time. But not everyone distinguishes between these five protein related terms. And so here in this video we're going to specifically distinguish between these five protein related terms. And so these five protein related terms air referring to amino acid chains that very in their length and so notice down below. We have this table that has the protein related terms over here on the left hand side, and then it has the length of the amino acid chain over here on the right hand side. And so the first protein related term that you all should know is, of course, amino acid, which we already talked about in our last lesson video. So we already know that amino acids are a single protein unit, or, in other words, ah, monomer of a protein is an amino acid. And then, of course, we can take these individual monomers these individual amino acids, and link them together to create a long chain of amino acids. And that's where these other four terms come into play. So the second term that we have here is going to be Allah go peptide. And so recall that the AHL ago prefix means a few. And so Allah go peptides are going to have an amino acid chains that have just a few amino acids somewhere between about two and about 20 covertly linked amino acids in the chain. So pretty short amino acid chains are illegal peptide chains. Now the term peptide without the Allah go prefix is referring to amino acid chains that have less than covertly linked amino acids. And so what's important to note here is that Allah go peptide and peptide. At some point, there's a little bit of overlap between the two terms. Now the fourth term that we have here is poly peptide and recall that the prefects polly means many. And so these air going to be amino acid chains that have greater than 50 amino acids that air co violently linked together. Yeah, and then the fifth and final term that we have here is protein itself. And so a protein is specifically referring to just one or multiple poly peptide chains that air specifically, and they're folded or functional forms. And so when we're talking about proteins were talking about poly peptides that are in there folded or functional forms. And when we say folded, what we mean is that these chains don't just remain as straight linear chains. They actually fold up into themselves and create these complex, three dimensional structures. And so, really, this leads us to our next lesson video, which is talking about the levels of structure of protein. So I'll see you all there in that video.