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A single amino acid monomer may also be called a residue, which indicates a repeating unit of a polymer. Proteins form by amino acids undergoing condensation reactions, in which the amino acids lose one water molecule per reaction in order to attach to one another with a peptide bond. By convention, a chain under 30 amino acids is often ...
Codon–amino acids mappings may be the biological information system at the primordial origin of life on Earth. [122] While amino acids and consequently simple peptides must have formed under different experimentally probed geochemical scenarios, the transition from an abiotic world to the first life forms is to a large extent still unresolved ...
Most proteins consist of linear polymers built from series of up to 20 L-α-amino acids. All proteinogenic amino acids have a common structure where an α-carbon is bonded to an amino group, a carboxyl group, and a variable side chain.
The Polynucleotides, RNA and DNA, are long polymers of nucleotides. Polypeptides include proteins and shorter polymers of amino acids; some major examples include collagen, actin, and fibrin. Polysaccharides are linear or branched chains of sugar carbohydrates; examples include starch, cellulose, and alginate.
Chains of fewer than twenty amino acids are called oligopeptides, and include dipeptides, tripeptides, and tetrapeptides. Peptides fall under the broad chemical classes of biological polymers and oligomers , alongside nucleic acids , oligosaccharides , polysaccharides , and others.
Polymer nomenclature is generally based upon the type of monomer residues comprising the polymer. A polymer which contains only a single type of repeat unit is known as a homopolymer, while a polymer containing two or more types of repeat units is known as a copolymer. [22] A terpolymer is a copolymer which contains three types of repeat units ...
DNA, RNA, and proteins all consist of a repeating structure of related building blocks (nucleotides in the case of DNA and RNA, amino acids in the case of proteins). In general, they are all unbranched polymers, and so can be represented in the form of a string.
In general, polypeptides are unbranched polymers, so their primary structure can often be specified by the sequence of amino acids along their backbone. However, proteins can become cross-linked, most commonly by disulfide bonds , and the primary structure also requires specifying the cross-linking atoms, e.g., specifying the cysteines involved ...