insulin

Pull a spaghetti noodle out of a box of pasta and take a look.  It's long and stiff.  Try to bend it and it breaks.  But fresh pasta is pliable.  It can fold just like cooked noodles. When students first look at an amino acid sequence, a long string of confusing letters, they often think those letters are part of a chain like an uncooked spaghetti noodle.  Stiff and unbending, with one end far from the other. Molecular modeling apps let us demonstrate that proteins are a bit more like fresh pasta. If we apply rainbow colors (Red Orange Yellow Blue Indigo Violet) to a protein chain, we can ... Read more

This video shows how we used the Molecule World iPad app to make an image of a folded insulin peptide. Protein folding brings the amino acid at the beginning of the protein chain near the amino acid at the other end.

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Sometimes when you go digging through the databases, you find unexpected things. When I was researching the previous posts on insulin structure and insulin evolution, I found something curious indeed.

by Sandra Porter

In my last post, I wrote about insulin and interesting features of the insulin structure . Some of the things I learned were really surprising. For example, I was surprised to learn how similar pig and human insulin are. I hadn't considered this before, but this made me wonder about the human insulin we used to give to one of our cats. How do cat and human insulin compare?

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by Sandra Porter

Molecules of sucrose tore apart in their bellies letting glucose course free in their veins.

Luckily for us, a system evolved long ago to capture that glucose and minimize it’s potential for damage.

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In my last post, I wrote about insulin and interesting features of the insulin structure.  Some of the things I learned were really surprising.  For example, I was surprised to learn how similar pig and human insulin are.  I hadn't considered this before, but this made me wonder about the human insulin we used to give to one of our cats.  How do cat and human insulin compare? It turns out, that all ... Read more
sucrose Sucrose

candyMolecules of sucrose tore apart in their bellies letting glucose course free in their veins ... Read more

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