Question: what kind of things to you look at in proteins

Rebecca Thompson answered on 13 Jun 2016:

Proteins are made up of building blocks called amino acids. There are 20 different amino acids which our bodies use to make proteins. You can imagine a protein is a long string of these building blocks, each a different size, and with different properties, some are positively charged, and some are negatively charged for example. When a protein is made in a cell (by a special molecular machine called a ribosome), this long string of amino acids is made, and starts to fold up into a specific shape. This shape helps the protein to do its job, for example for an enzyme would help chemical reactions happen in a cell. By looking at a protein, we can tell exactly what shape it makes, and use this to help work out how it functions. This is pretty cool, because these protein machines are usually way smaller than 0.0001 mm!