Question about Amino Acids

[jbrice1639]

This is my first official Allo thread...hopefully not too *****ic...

I somehow managed to slide through all of my undergrad chem/bio courses without ever actually learning/memorizing the amino acids. Is that going to be something that a med school biochem course will assume I already know? i.e. should I bust out the flash cards and finally learn these little bastards?

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[Scalpellum]

This is my first official Allo thread...hopefully not too *****ic...

I somehow managed to slide through all of my undergrad chem/bio courses without ever actually learning/memorizing the amino acids. Is that going to be something that a med school biochem course will assume I already know? i.e. should I bust out the flash cards and finally learn these little bastards?

I am not sure but they are really easy to memorize. All you have to do is memorize the side chain on each aa. Also it is beneficial to group the side chains in specific categories.

 

[emack]

I doubt most med students have to learn these. We certainly didn't. That being said, they're not that difficult to shovel into your short-term memory. Learning them ahead of time is a wasted effort because (with a few exceptions) they won't stick with you...

 

[DoctorFunk]

It will probably be very dependent on your particular professors. We were asked to memorize the AAs during our biochem course, but you really only had to remember the amino acids with a unique structural feature or function. Other than that, you essentially just had to know approximately at what pHs they would be protonated or not. Nothing hard to remember for one exam, but definitely not something that would stick for more than a week if you crammed it all in this summer. Relax!

 

[jbrice1639]

It will probably be very dependent on your particular professors. We were asked to memorize the AAs during our biochem course, but you really only had to remember the amino acids with a unique structural feature or function. Other than that, you essentially just had to know approximately at what pHs they would be protonated or not. Nothing hard to remember for one exam, but definitely not something that would stick for more than a week if you crammed it all in this summer. Relax!

thanks for the advice. for the most part, i'm definitely trying to relax. i took a medicinal chem course during my post-bac just to get some extra science credits in, and i ended up being the only person in the class who didn't have the amino acids memorized. so i was just trying to make sure i wasn't screwing myself. i agree that they've never seemed to be something that actually sticks in the brain for very long, but i figured i'd give it a shot if it was gonna be considered "common knowledge" in a biochem class the way it was in that medicinal chem course.

 

[cunam_amoris]

We definitely had to memorize them for our M1 biochem course. And they kept coming back to haunt us on the next three tests due to 1) cummulative tests and 2) material learned later requires a knowledge of side chains and their properties.

That being said, you shouldn't have any difficulty memorizing them.

That being said, memorizing the 20 common amino acids and then a few others is about the easiest med school gets. Keep in mind, though, gone are the days where a test question is as absurdly easy as "Circle the structure of Tryptophan."

 

[cfdavid]

Just out of curiosity, I'd like to hear experiences on whether a.a.'s are abreviated with the three letter OR one letter designation. Most of my experiences have been with the 3 letters, but I thought that more advanced courses went to the single letter method. Anyone??

 

[QofQuimica]

This is my first official Allo thread...hopefully not too *****ic...

I somehow managed to slide through all of my undergrad chem/bio courses without ever actually learning/memorizing the amino acids. Is that going to be something that a med school biochem course will assume I already know? i.e. should I bust out the flash cards and finally learn these little bastards?

I can't imagine any good purpose to med schools making you do that when it's so easy to just look them up....I managed to get my PhD without ever being required to memorize the aa's. That being said, I did memorize them just because I was drawing them all the time.

cfdavid, speaking for grad students at least, we used both. Generally we'd use the three-letter abbreviation when we were discussing individual aa's, and the one-letter one when we were discussing peptide sequences. I've also seen residue substitutions generally written with the one letter designation. Ex. V33L means that at position 33, leucine has replaced valine.

 

[velo]

If you can find a way to learn the essential AAs and make it stick that's nice. I'm finding you need it for Step 1

 

[QofQuimica]

If you can find a way to learn the essential AAs and make it stick that's nice. I'm finding you need it for Step 1

Isn't there a mnemonic for that? PVT TIM HALL I think.

 

[velo]

Isn't there a mnemonic for that? PVT TIM HALL I think.

yeah but you have to remember what each one means.

several combinations of AAs can give that mnemonic

 

[dbzgohan]

at my undergrad biochem our professor made us memorize all aa, their 3 letter abrivations, and also the one letter one, ther pH. She expected us to know the tinest bit of minutia. was not to bad though, i learned alot, and when i had to take a graduate biochem class at another school. I kicked a**, and ended up with like a 96 average. Also the notes we had for that graduate class were the exact same notes the med students had as well. I really credit my success in the class to my undergrad professor.

 

[Iwy Em Hotep]

Isn't there a mnemonic for that? PVT TIM HALL I think.

Not a big fan of this one, since I wasn't sure whether each letter was for the 1-letter code (it's not) or for the letter the amino acid starts with.

If you know the 1-letter codes, the nonessential amino acids spell:
Q GYPSY DANCE

I wrote a good story about this once.

 

[velo]

If you know the 1-letter codes...

ha, again, a big "if"

 

[cfdavid]

cfdavid, speaking for grad students at least, we used both. Generally we'd use the three-letter abbreviation when we were discussing individual aa's, and the one-letter one when we were discussing peptide sequences. I've also seen residue substitutions generally written with the one letter designation. Ex. V33L means that at position 33, leucine has replaced valine.

Yeah, that makes sense to use the single letter abreviation when sequencing. Saves a lot of space.

 

[Flopotomist]

Hey jbrice... don't worry, we will be at the same school, and as a philosophy major, I barely even know what an Amino Acid is, let alone have any of them memorized. We can sit with the flashcards together if need be.

 

[Jsad]

I don't know about memorizing every single AA, but PVT TIM HALL always helps...to make it even more effective, memorize it like this:

"PVT TIM HALL always argues, never tires."​

The second part of this mnemonic is clarifying the point that the "A" from HALL is arginine, while the "T's" are Threonine and Tryptophan, and not Tyrosine.

Hope this helps.

 

[Turkeyman]

For some reason, they always stick in my mind as:

GLAVIM (aliphatic/nonpolar)
P (proline *points and laughs at proline*)
FYW(aromatic)
SNQCT(polar)
HAL(+)
DE(-)

Not intuitive at all, but hey...yay

 

[Law2Doc]

We definitely had to memorize them for our M1 biochem course. And they kept coming back to haunt us on the next three tests due to 1) cummulative tests and 2) material learned later requires a knowledge of side chains and their properties.

That being said, you shouldn't have any difficulty memorizing them.

Agreed -- expect at some schools to memorize and draw them. But no need to know this before the med school biochem class starts -- one good night of memorization with homemade flash cards usually suffices.

 

[TX515]

this past year as a graduate student I had to learn the amino acids, their ionization properties, what type of amino acid (as in polar, acidic, etc), and what codons codes for it.

 

[Turkeyman]

I wouldn't like having to learn the whole codon table, eugh!

 

[CTtarheel]

It's the first thing I had to do in biochem in college, but there are only 20 of them . . . its really not a big deal.

 

[Jsad]

by the way...memorizing AAs will be the least of your worries. Compared to memorizing courses of arteries and nerves, and various anatomical relations, AAs is a walk in the park.