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A Beginners' Guide to Molecular Biology



Animated Dictionnary Definition


Alpha


First letter of the greek alphabet.
Used in different ways in Biology and Chemistry:
  • Alpha Carbon (Chemistry) is the nearest carbon to a main organic group.
  • Alpha helix is found in proteins. It is a simple helicoidal arrangement of amino acids.
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    Related Links

    This is a search for alpha in our database

    • Homology Modeling for Beginners: Homology models are useful to get a rough idea where the alpha carbons of key residues sit the folded protein. They can guide mutagenesis experiments, or hypotheses about structure-function relationships.
    • Kimball's Biology Pages: Meiosis:   The pages consist of alphabetized lists of biological terms (a glossary) mostly from the areas of molecular and cellular biology. Many items are linked to "mini" essays on the topic.
    • Kimball's Biology Pages: Mitosis: The pages consist of alphabetized lists of biological terms (a glossary) mostly from the areas of molecular and cellular biology. Many items are linked to "mini" essays on the topic.
    • RASCAL: rapid scanning and correction of multiple sequence alignments : The accuracy and reliability of RASCAL is demonstrated using: (i) alignments from the BAliBASE benchmark database, where significant improvements were often observed, with no deterioration of the existing high-quality regions, (ii) a large scale study involving 946 alignments from the ProDom protein domain database, where alignment quality was increased in 68% of the cases; and (iii) an automatic pipeline to obtain a high-quality alignment of 695 full-length nuclear receptor proteins, which took 11 min on a DEC Alpha 6100 computer
    • SCORPION (amino acid frequences): SCORPION is the WWW tool for analysis of the amino acid frequences within protein chain(s) (of given pdb file or group of pdb files) as well as foranalysis of 3D contacts of C-alpha and/or Last Hevy Atoms in the residue side chain (LHA). Convinient Graphical presentation can be used for identification of specific interactions for given family of the proteins or given domains.
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