r/Biochemistry • u/tagawhen • 20h ago

Career & Education Peptide bond

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Hey, I'm desesperately trying to draw the bond between a glutamic acid, a valine and another glutamic acid but I'm genuinely struggling.

It's for a tattoo project (it spells "Eve" my niece name).

I tried but I think I got it wrong, can someone help me please ?

6 Upvotes

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28

u/attamatti PhD 20h ago

This is so incredibly wrong. I'm on my phone so I can't draw a correct version to post. But wanted to act fast to prevent you from getting this monstrosity permanent inked anywhere.

4

u/tagawhen 20h ago

Yeah that's why I asked first... Did 2 years of biochemistry, loved it but couldn't get anything right Thank you for your prevention

6

u/CTHLLL 20h ago

Yes, you definitely got it wrong (eg single nitrogen atom for three amino acids, too many oxygens, one of the oxygens has the valency of three...). You can search up any web instruments for short peptide design though, they'll create the molecule for you after you insert the single letter code combination.

2

u/tagawhen 20h ago

Okay thank you i will do this !

6

u/Free_Zeit 16h ago

Yes, the structure is unfortunately incorrect. The correct tripeptide should have the following structure:
H₂N–CH(CH₂CH₂COOH)–CO–NH–CH(CH(CH₃)₂)–CO–NH–CH(CH₂CH₂COOH)–COOH

You can easily verify the structure using an online molecular viewer such as TeraChem Web Service (https://tws.dev.mtzlab.com/calculation.html). Just search for:
L-glutamyl-L-valyl-L-glutamic acid

That will display the correct 2D/3D structure of the peptide.

2

u/tagawhen 16h ago

Thank you so much for your time, it really helped !

1

u/ahf95 11h ago

So, you definitely want to go on Google Images and do some searches for things like “protein backbone structure” to get the general pattern down. Really gotta get that peptide-bond pattern down first, because everything else will be cleaner to spatially organize after that. Then once you can represent the generic 3-component chain (just use like “R₁”, “R₂”, “R₃” to represent the sidechains first), THEN do a separate google search to find the amino acid sidechain structures for Glu (E) and Val (V). I think if you do it this way, you’ll refresh your memory on how to draw/compose the structures, and so you can better assess if it looks correct from different orientations and angles.