Amino Acids

[jetjesse]

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For those of you who have taken an actual DAT, what kinds of amino acid questions show up?
I have not taken biochem. so I wondered if we should be familiar with the names of all 20 naturally occuring AA's and their structures or just "AA theory".

 

[Balki]

Originally posted by jetjesse
For those of you who have taken an actual DAT, what kinds of amino acid questions show up?
I have not taken biochem. so I wondered if we should be familiar with the names of all 20 naturally occuring AA's and their structures or just "AA theory".

Structures? :🙂 no nothing like that. I don't even remember any questions on Amino acids. The might ask you some basic ones on the Orgo section. ANd no you are no required to know the names of all amino acids, just the 20 naturally occuring, JUST JOKING. Know what they are and that AA sequence is the proteins primary structure.

 

[faulknce]

I would also recommend that you know the relationship between pI and pH, and which form of the amino acid would be present if pI>pH or if pI<pH.

 

[davedefunk]

Originally posted by faulknce
I would also recommend that you know the relationship between pI and pH, and which form of the amino acid would be present if pI>pH or if pI<pH.

please explain!

 

[bloomer]

i had one amino acid question and it was along the lines of what faulknce was talking about.

the question goes like this:

at ph 1, what will be the resonance state of a certain given amino acid. and you will see that the correct response for this answer will be protonated amino group nh3+ and protonated carboxilic groups cooh. why, because at low ph their is an excess of (h+) due to the acidity of the solution and those groups will be protonated. the reverse would be high ph/basic medium and in that case the carboxilic group would be deprotonated by the excess base and the amino group would be in its native form.

if i screwed that up anyone, please correct me if i'm wrong.

the only other aa question i could think of would be:

are all aa's chiral? and the answer would be no be glycine i believe is the lone achiral aa because its got a h r group

their may be others but i found the ochem section to be fairly straight forward - do know a bit about separation techniques though - that could have been one of the ones i missed and its easy if you study it a bit. i wasn't prepared for it

good luck

bloomer

 

[faulknce]

you're right bloomer.....thanks for explaining

 

[davedefunk]

thanks bloomer!