Lecture 6

Question 1

What are supersecondary structure?

Answer 1

Combinations of secondary structures that form recognizable patters , and in turn build up into tertiary structures.

Question 2

What stabilizes tertiary structure?

Answer 2

tertiary structure is stabilised by long range interactions involving amino acid residues that may be far apart in the primary sequence. The structure is maintained by non-covalent interactions, and in the case of extracellular proteins often by covalent disulphide bonds

Question 3

What do ionic bonds do?

Answer 3

Ionic bonds involve just the ionisable side chains and the two termini, and are much less common. Sometimes a metal ion such as Zn2+ or Ca2+ is bound, adding stability to the protein.

Question 4

What are domains?

Answer 4

A domain is a relatively stable independently folded region within the tertiary structure of a globular protein. A protein might contain one, two or more domains, which often have a particular function associated with them

Question 5

In Quaternary structures, what is each tertiary structure referred to as?

Answer 5

Subunits, can be dimers, trimers, tetramers etc.