Annotated List of Web-Sites
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 BioTech
site describes itself as "a hybrid biology/chemistry educational
resource
and research tool on the World Wide Web. BioTech is intended to be a
learning
tool that will attract students and enrich the public's knowledge of
biology
issues in the world today. At the same time, BioTech is also a research
tool for those already involved in the broad subject of biology. By
providing
information about resources, as well as avenues for further
exploration,
we intend to open the doors of biology resources to post-secondary
students,
researchers, and faculty."
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 at the University of California at davis
has
a nice presentation of amino
acid structures and properties as well.
Hemoglobin Structure Site. The University of
Massachusetts
has a great site where you can play with models
of hemoglobin A and hemoglobin S.
Hemoglobin
Gene
Server at Penn State provides many links and the opportunity to
compare hemoglobin gene sequences from different species.
There are numerous sites for Hemoglobinopathies such as Sickle Cell Anemia. A good entry point is at Emory University.
American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, has a number of educational resource links at its web-site.
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 another web-site at Yale University where you will paste your sequence(s). There the amino acid composition and molecular weight 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.
Sites on Sickle Cell Disease, Hemoglobin, and
Related
Topics.
How
Does Sickle Cell Cause Disease?
Disorders
of red blood cells.
Human
hemoglobin variants.
Sickle
cell anemia.
Vanderbilt
Medical Center - Sickle cell syndromes.
Morehouse
School of Medicine - Sickle Cell Information Center and links.
Biosynthesis
of heme.
Heme
catabolism.
Electrophoresis
of hemoglobin.
Sickle
Cell Anemia Webpage.
The
process of sickling.