Biochemistry: How You Exhale the Fat You Lose
The chemistry that keeps you alive, from how proteins fold and enzymes work to where your food's energy, carbon and nitrogen really go.
Try 3 questions
1. Sickle cell disease comes from changing how many amino acids in each hemoglobin beta chain?
- Just one
- About a dozen
- Roughly half
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Answer: Just one
A single swap of glutamate for valine creates a sticky patch that makes deoxygenated hemoglobin link into rigid fibers, bending red cells into sickles.
2. When you cook an egg white until it turns solid, what happens to its proteins?
- They break down into free amino acids
- They unfold, but their chains stay intact
- They are chemically converted into fats
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Answer: They unfold, but their chains stay intact
Heat breaks the weak bonds holding each protein's shape, so chains unfold and tangle together; the sequence of amino acids is unchanged.
3. What mainly determines the three-dimensional shape a protein folds into?
- The sugar backbone of its gene
- Its own sequence of amino acids
- The shape of the cell around it
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Answer: Its own sequence of amino acids
Experiments showing that unfolded proteins can refold correctly on their own established that the sequence carries the information for the final shape.
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