If you want to find research articles on biochemical topics, search PubMed and the Web of Science. Both provide excellent access to the research literature. The Web of Science is a service that the Morris Library subscibes to so access is limited to on-campus accounts. It has some nice features such as a listing of the number of times particular articles have been cited by subsequent articles to which you can link.

The Online Macromolecular Museum site has a particularly nice presentation of the chemical structures of the amino acids commonly found in proteins. This site, in addition to links to other good sites, also has a nice interactive demonstration of the chemistry that gives proteins structure using chymotrypsin as an example. Another site links to the structures and properties of amino acids.

Hemoglobin Oxygen Binding Calculator: This site enbles you to see how the oxygen binding curve of human hemoglobin is affected by a number of variables including temperature, pH, pO₂, pCO₂, DPG, and high altitude.

American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, has a number of educational resource links at its web-site. The Universioty of Delaware has an ASBMB student affiliate chapter (ASBMB-UAN) that undergraduates can join and get involved in their activities. In 2008, the UD Chapter received the outstanding chapter award in the country!

Want to find out how many residues of various amino acids hemoglobin chains have? Try this. Go to the SwissProt web-site and type in the sequence you want, e.g. horse hemoglobin. [The two files you should find are P01958 and P02062 for alpha and beta horse hemoglobin.] You will get a bunch of information including the amino acid sequence. Scroll down to "sequence information" and click on FASTA Format. Highlight the string of capital letters corresponding to the amino acid sequence and move the sequence to the clip board. Then go to The ExPASy web-site where you will paste your sequence(s). There the amino acid composition, molecular weight, and pI will be calculated and displayed. Using this approach, you can find the number of Cysteine and Methionine amino acid residues in the alpha and beta chains of horse hemoglobin. With this you should be able to check whether Zinoffsky's data are consistent with what we know today. Note the mass of the heme group is not included in the web-site calculations.