Pharmacology & biology
Amino acid
Also known as: amino acids · residue
The building block of peptides and proteins; twenty standard amino acids make up nearly all human biology.
In plain terms
Each amino acid in a chain is called a residue. The order in which they appear — the sequence — determines how the chain folds and therefore what it binds to and does.
Peptide drugs often swap one residue for another to change a property. Semaglutide, for example, substitutes a non-standard amino acid at position 8 of native GLP-1 specifically to resist the enzyme that would otherwise destroy it within minutes.
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