Scientists shed light on controversial theory of protein structure

A team of chemists, biochemists and mathematicians at the University of Bristol have published a paper Chemical Biology, which explores how protein structures are stabilised. There are many forces that hold together the three-dimensional, functional structures of proteins. Despite considerable effort, understanding of these forces is still quite rudimentary. The research from the Bristol team aimed to dissect out some of these forces by reducing the complexity of the problem. Proteins are chains of amino acids linked together by so-called amide bonds. These chains respond to water to fold up into their preferred 3D structures. One of the substructures in the hierarchy of folded proteins is called the a-helix.