Transcription
So once proteins at once amino acids have been strung together to make a long chain, um, you end up with something that looks like this, right? Um, like my little thing here, okay? Um, but in all the pictures we've seen of proteins, they've shown like a big blob. So how did you get from a long chain to a big blob?
Well, um, protein has to fold itself. That the chain has to fold itself up. So first of all, some vocabulary on this slide here, um, we can see here's the chain with the beads, all right? And it's each individual bead is an individual amino acid. There's 20 different colors. And this is a protein in this order of amino acids. Mine's a different protein because the order is different. Um, and you can see here, zooming in, they're showing you the dark green is phenylalanine, this is leucine, this is serine, this is cysteine. So, you know, this is an example of how the chain is structured. But while the individual beads are called amino acids, once you've got them all hooked together in a chain, then we call it a polypeptide. So it means a whole chain of amino acids. I don't know why they don't call it a polyamino acid. I, I don't know. It's just probably historical. But this is, this would be called a polypeptide. And it doesn't officially get called a protein until it's folded up into its final three-dimensional shape, whatever it might be. And that's why in this diagram, this is what we call the protein because you can see the chain is kind of tangled up together.
Now, this step from the chain to the tangling up to the three-dimensional shape is incredibly important. And so, um, in the next few slides, we're going to talk about, uh, how this folding happens. Um, because I want you to start thinking about proteins, um, instead of thinking about them as like food stuffs like steak or eggs or something like that. Uh, you need to start thinking about proteins as individual molecules and as molecules that have jobs. And they act like tools in your body. They each do a different job. And so if you think about tools in your garage, um, they all have a different shape. Like a screwdriver is a different shape to a wrench, and a wrench is a different shape to a hammer. And a screwdriver makes a really bad wrench, and a hammer makes a really bad screwdriver, right? A hammer works because it's the shape it is. It has something heavy on the end of a long handle. A screwdriver works because it's the shape it is because it has a handle or something long that fits into the screw. So for tools to work correctly, they have to have the correct three-dimensional shape. And that's exactly the same thing for proteins. If they don't have the right shape, they can't do their job, whatever their job is. And so making sure that this folds up exactly correctly into the exact right three-dimensional shape is absolutely vital. And if it folds up wrong, it won't work right. And if it doesn't work right, whatever job it was supposed to do in your body, it won't be able to do correctly. And so that can result in some kind of sickness, illness, genetic disease, or whatever, some, some problem probably manifesting in your body. So having proteins that fold up correctly is incredibly important so they have the right shape so they can do their job. And the next few slides, we're going to talk about how proteins fold up the right way.