Relation To Secondary and Tertiary Structure
The primary structure of a biological polymer to a large extent determines the three-dimensional shape known as the tertiary structure, but nucleic acid and protein folding are so complex that knowing the primary structure often doesn't help either to deduce the shape or to predict localized secondary structure, such as the formation of loops or helices. However, knowing the structure of a similar homologous sequence (for example a member of the same protein family) can unambiguously identify the tertiary structure of the given sequence. Sequence families are often determined by sequence clustering, and structural genomics projects aim to produce a set of representative structures to cover the sequence space of possible non-redundant sequences.
Read more about this topic: Protein Primary Structure
Famous quotes containing the words relation to, relation, secondary, tertiary and/or structure:
“You must realize that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“You know there are no secrets in America. It’s quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“Scientific reason, with its strict conscience, its lack of prejudice, and its determination to question every result again the moment it might lead to the least intellectual advantage, does in an area of secondary interest what we ought to be doing with the basic questions of life.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)
“When a house is tottering to its fall,
The strain lies heaviest on the weakest part,
One tiny crack throughout the structure spreads,
And its own weight soon brings it toppling down.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)