| Creation Truth Outreach, Inc. Pamphlet |
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| Appendix A. Tutorial 2. Amino Acids: Life’s Building Block Molecules We just talked about three kinds of molecules, methane, ammonia, and formic acid. It turns out that these three molecules can easily join to each other in various combinations. Some of these combinations are extremely interesting and useful. Others are not useful in living systems and if they accidentally formed under origin-of-life conditions would only promote the formation of tar. Let’s take one molecule of formic acid and one molecule of methane and join them together. A new molecule is formed from the two original molecules. It is called acetic acid, more commonly known as vinegar. Now let’s join a vinegar molecule to an ammonia molecule. The molecule formed by this reaction is called glycine. Glycine is really significant. It is a particular kind of an amino acid; in fact it is the simplest amino acid. Amino acids are extremely important in living systems and we will talk more about them in a minute. Just be aware that the simplest amino acid is nothing more than a molecule of vinegar joined to a molecule of ammonia in a certain manner. Notice, we can also think of glycine as being a molecule of formic acid, a molecule of methane, and a molecule of ammonia joined together in a tiny chain. There are literally thousands of kinds of amino acids possible. However, living systems are based on twenty common ones. Let’s start with a molecule of glycine. Let’s then bond a second methane molecule to the first one. This new structure represents another amino acid called alanine. The second methane molecule is called a side chain. Lots of different molecules and combinations of molecules can be used in side chains. The different amino acids differ from each other by the composition of their side chains. For instance, let’s start with a molecule of alanine. Then we will add a molecule of formic acid to the end of its side chain. This forms a third kind of amino acid called glutamic acid. Finally, let’s start with a molecule of alanine. Then let’s add a molecule of vinegar to the end of its side chain. This forms a fourth kind of amino acid called aspartic acid. These four amino acids—glycine, alanine, glutamic acid, and aspartic acid—are the four simplest amino acids. We will also talk about them a lot in the next session. So, you might do well to remember their names. These are the only ones we will talk about, so you do not need to worry about getting completely overwhelmed with a lot of strange names. |