CHEM-342 Introduction to Biochemistry

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.



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Last updated: 13 March 2003 by Hal White
Copyright 2002 Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Delaware