Protein Characteristic for New Beginners

Abstract

One of the branches of biotechnology is proteomics. It is an interesting field as proteins, unlike DNA which made up of combination of 4 nucleotides, is made up of combination of 22 amino acids, where the sequence of the amino acids gives uniqueness to each protein. In addition, the structure of the protein such as primary, secondary, tertiary and the folding of protein into quaternary making the protein different although they may have similar amino acid sequence. Furthermore, a functional protein may be consisting of more than one polypeptide. Each of the amino acid has different characteristic therefore the combination of the amino acids making protein to have different degrees of polarity. In addition, the post translation modification of protein, such as glycosylation, lipid components and metal ions making the protein to function differently according to their activity. All this made handling of protein difficult and if one is not careful, it may cause the problem in reproducibility of protein based experimental work.