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When consecutively measuring amino acids of a protein, changes in value indicate attraction of specific protein regions towards the hydrophobic region inside lipid bilayer. The hydrophobic or hydrophilic character of a compound or amino acid is its hydropathic character, [1] hydropathicity, or hydropathy.
The plot reveals whether hydrophobic amino acids are concentrated on one side of the helix, usually with polar or hydrophilic amino acids on the other. This arrangement is common in alpha helices within globular proteins, where one face of the helix is oriented toward the hydrophobic core and one face is oriented toward the solvent-exposed surface.
The Hopp–Woods hydrophilicity scale of amino acids is a method of ranking the amino acids in a protein according to their water solubility in order to search for surface locations on proteins, and especially those locations that tend to form strong interactions with other macromolecules such as proteins, DNA, and RNA.
For example, the "unfolded" bacteriorhodopsin in SDS micelles has four transmembrane α-helices folded, while the rest of the protein is situated at the micelle-water interface and can adopt different types of non-native amphiphilic structures. Free energy differences between such detergent-denatured and native states are similar to stabilities ...
When these alpha helices dimerize, the zipper is formed. The hydrophobic side of the helix forms a dimer with itself or another similar helix, burying the non-polar amino acids away from the solvent. The hydrophilic side of the helix interacts with the water in the solvent.
Analyzing the shape of the plot gives information about partial structure of the protein. For instance, if a stretch of about 20 amino acids shows positive for hydrophobicity, these amino acids may be part of alpha-helix spanning across a lipid bilayer, which is composed of hydrophobic fatty acids. On the converse, amino acids with high ...
A transmembrane domain (TMD, TM domain) is a membrane-spanning protein domain.TMDs may consist of one or several alpha-helices or a transmembrane beta barrel.Because the interior of the lipid bilayer is hydrophobic, the amino acid residues in TMDs are often hydrophobic, although proteins such as membrane pumps and ion channels can contain polar residues.
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.