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Microorganisms and plants synthesize many uncommon amino acids. For example, some microbes make 2-aminoisobutyric acid and lanthionine, which is a sulfide-bridged derivative of alanine. Both of these amino acids are found in peptidic lantibiotics such as alamethicin. [116]
Derivatization of amino acids is necessary to ease its partition into a C18 bonded phase. Another scale had been developed in 1971 and used peptide retention on hydrophilic gel. [ 26 ] 1-butanol and pyridine were used as the mobile phase in this particular scale and glycine was used as the reference value.
A hydrophilicity plot is a quantitative analysis of the degree of hydrophobicity or hydrophilicity of amino acids of a protein. It is used to characterize or identify possible structure or domains of a protein. The plot has amino acid sequence of a protein on its x-axis, and degree of hydrophobicity and hydrophilicity on its y-axis.
An example of an amino acid sequence plotted on a helical wheel. Aliphatic residues are shown as blue squares, polar or negatively charged residues as red diamonds, and positively charged residues as black octagons. A helical wheel is a type of plot or visual representation used to illustrate the properties of alpha helices in proteins.
Proteins that have high hydrophobic amino acid content on the surface have low solubility in an aqueous solvent. Charged and polar surface residues interact with ionic groups in the solvent and increase the solubility of a protein. Knowledge of a protein's amino acid composition will aid in determining an ideal precipitation solvent and methods.
The side chains from the amino acid residues found in a β-sheet structure may also be arranged such that many of the adjacent sidechains on one side of the sheet are hydrophobic, while many of those adjacent to each other on the alternate side of the sheet are polar or charged (hydrophilic), [21] which can be useful if the sheet is to form a ...
In a hydrophilic environment such as cytosol, the hydrophobic amino acids will concentrate at the core of the protein, while the hydrophilic amino acids will be on the exterior. This is entropically favorable since water molecules can move much more freely around hydrophilic amino acids than hydrophobic amino acids.
In many cases, the strands contain alternating polar and non-polar (hydrophilic and hydrophobic) amino acids, so that the hydrophobic residues are oriented into the interior of the barrel to form a hydrophobic core and the polar residues are oriented toward the outside of the barrel on the solvent-exposed surface.