Name the covalent bond that helps to stabilize the tertiary structure of a protein.

Question

Accepted Answer

Hi everybody and welcome. Our next question says, true or false. Disulfide bonds are covalent bonds that maintain the stability of a protein's tertiary structure. A true or be false. So when we think about the different types of or the different aspects of protein structure, you always have to think about where are the interactions taking place. So we call that the tertiary structure involves interactions between the atoms of the side chains of the amino acids making up a peptide recall that primary structure is the actual amino acid sequence. So you're just talking about the alphabet or the spelling of the protein. So if you want to say, you know, what type of bonds are you talking about? You'd just be talking about the peptide bonds between each amino acid. And then the secondary structure involves interactions between the backbone atoms of the amino acids. And then of course, quaternary is interactions between multiple peptide chains in proteins that have more than one peptide chain. So when we talk about our particular problem here, let's make sure are we talking about side chain interactions? And it says that we have disulfide bonds. So disulfide bonds form in the context of proteins between the sulfur atoms in cysteine residues. And we know the sulfur atoms are indeed part of the R group or the side chain. So we are talking about tertiary structure since we're talking about interactions among the side chains. And now, so they do maintain the stability because these disulfide bonds are indeed covalent bonds. And so they're quite strong bonds, strong bonds. So we have strong bonds between atoms on a side chain. So yes, they do. OK, I've put these two together, they do maintain the stability of the protein's tertiary structure. So our answer is going to be choice a true that indeed disulfide bonds are covalent bonds that maintain the stability of a protein's tertiary structure. See you in the next video.

Name the covalent bond that helps to stabilize the tertiary structure of a protein.

Verified video answer for a similar problem:

Key Concepts

Covalent Bonds

Tertiary Structure of Proteins

Disulfide Bonds