24 free flashcards
MCAT Amino Acids flashcards
This deck covers all twenty proteinogenic amino acids: the three-letter and one-letter abbreviations, the side-chain class each belongs to (nonpolar, polar uncharged, aromatic, acidic, or basic), and the distinguishing property the MCAT keeps returning to — which are essential, which carry charge at physiological pH, which contain sulfur, and which side chains titrate in a range you can be asked about. Four summary cards pull the cross-cutting groupings together.
Biochemistry is the largest single content area on the MCAT's Biological and Biochemical Foundations section, and amino acid identity sits underneath almost all of it: enzyme mechanisms, protein folding, isoelectric points, electrophoresis and chromatography questions, and the reasoning behind any mutation that swaps one residue for another. Passages routinely use one-letter codes without defining them, so recognition has to be instant rather than reconstructed on the spot.
The deck
How to study this deck
- Concentrate on the one-letter codes that are counterintuitive — W for tryptophan, F for phenylalanine, K for lysine, R for arginine, Q for glutamine, N for asparagine, Y for tyrosine — since the intuitive ones (A, G, S, T) take care of themselves.
- Rehearse the twenty by charge class rather than alphabetically: two acidic (Asp, Glu), three basic (Lys, Arg, His), then the polar uncharged set, then the nonpolar set. Charge class is what actually answers isoelectric point and electrophoresis questions.
- For every amino acid, pair the structure with the one property a passage would exploit: cysteine forms disulfide bridges, proline kinks helices, histidine buffers near pH 7, tryptophan and tyrosine give the 280 nm absorbance used to quantify protein.