Proteins dedicate and create almost every cellular process imaginable. The field Protein Science remains extensively studied to date and continues to offer invaluable insight into the management of disease for just about every ontology known. However, these submicroscopic polymer-based manifestations are hardly known as part of pop culture. In that right, this workbook dedicates itself to addressing the atoms which form the basis of amino acids, to amino acids and their permutative properties to permit protozoan and metazoan organisms to proliferate and flourish. Proteins are life-sustaining as a result of the fact that most of the DNA in genetic material harbors genes, most of which codify the necessary instructions to create polypeptide tools for the cell to defy chemical equilibrium. It can be said that proteins are intimately a part of the autopoietic character of cells, and how they've grown from an unknown origin. _Amino Acid, Sequence, Secondary Structure, Protein Dynamics, Kinetic Landscape_ --- # Amino Acids in 0-D Amino acids are the individual building blocks of proteins. They cannot be broken down any further without losing their characteristic properties that pertain to polypeptides. If broken down further, these amino acids would no longer behave as they would in real-life biology, and without select atoms, the properties of these small molecules would change due to a change in their chemical identity. > > > **All 20 amino acids in 3D, > represented by the ball-and-stick model.** > > [Nucleic Acids Research **41**: W432–W440 (2020)](https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkt431) These essential building blocks are not only found in every single lifeform imaginable but are also part of non-living microbes like viruses. It can be said, for our example of viruses, that they're only around due to hijacking what proteins are made by the cell when infected. So not only are proteins not alive, but they permit non-living systems to exist, and when large enough in size, allow living systems to exist, too. In that way, proteins share a core part of developmental philosophy, how things grow as unimaginably well-controlled concerts, proteins share a unique journey between it all. ## Twenty Amino Acids For everything alive, to have been alive, extinct, or even later to live as part of the same or newly developing species only requires 20 amino acids. It is likely true that earlier forms of life may have experienced problem solving on the molecular level with less amino acids, however, today, every organism known can be analyzed to find that they contain just 20. The power is a unique ability for each amino acid to participate in the final three-dimensional structure of a protein, and not only this, but their ability to form in space via astrobiology continues to be investigated. Almost every amino acid, at 17, have been found, not in one space rock, but from the analysis of several to determine they do in fact form in space. However, their capacity to covalently bond with each other, granting countless properties for cells and living systems to benefit, do not form in meteorites. This makes proteins exceptionally rare and just about statistically impossible to spontaneously form elsewhere. Because there are 20 standard, canonical, or otherwise commonly found amino acids here on Earth, researchers in the field of protein science have assigned symbols, or letter codes like an alphabet, to each amino acid to keep things short. We'll get into the details of why an abbreviation or symbol does a better job for select representations over spelling out the amino acid in full. Amino acids on their own are commonly floating around in the cell with most actively binding and captured to be held-in-place like a glove by another another molecule called mRNA. The lowercase M (m-) is an initialism for "messenger" as a function of the RNA molecule. It operates as a cartridge to hold a single amino acid to be prepared like a cassette, offloaded onto a significantly more large, multi-biomolecular complex called a ribosome. ## 236 Years of Science The knowledgebase that's central to protein chemistry started with understanding, again, the building blocks of these biopolymers. There is emphasis with biopolymer in that proteins are understood via their monomers—amino acids our case. # Primary Sequence in 1-D # Skeletal Structure in 2-D # Secondary Folding in 3-D >  > **Two common tertiary motifs of protein.** >  > > **Proinsulin; human insulin monomer, dimer, and full multimer.** > > [Drugs **74**: 911–927 (2014)](https://doi.org/10.1007/s40265-014-0226-4) # Tertiary Dynamics in 4-D # Energy Landscapes in 5-D