Once In A Blue Moon

             How would you all have least wanted to spend your tuesday morning? How does sacrificing your beauty sleep to attend a 9.15 a.m. lab session on playing ‘chemistry lego’ sounds like to you? Well, that is what our class had to do today; the only consolation was we do not need to write a report!!

From left: L-alanine, Glycine zwitterion, dipeptide molecule formed by joining L-alanine and glycine

The threesome in lab (from left): Sin Qi, steph the camwhore=P, me whose face looks fat here

Many units of L-alanine made for the building of secondary protein structures: the alpha helix and beta pleated sheet.

The following conversation ACTUALLY took place.

Steph: wah so hard to join them, why don’t we put them closely and just tell sir we kaudim already? (as you all can see,when many molecules are put closely together, it looks like a complexe molecule to you)

(the 3 of us sorta figured out how to build the beta pleated sheet by eliminating ‘water’)

Me: For the hydrogen bonds, which O atom do we join to?

Steph (in cantonese): wah why ask me?

Me: (gestured dr. y to come) Sir, sir!

Dr. Y: Yes?

Steph and Me: Which O do we join the hydrogen bonds to?

Dr. Y: You are supposed to figure out yourself, you are supposed to build the model like Watson and Crick.

Me: But we are stephanie and gw. (ok that was so lame la!!!)

Steph: *laughing*

*Drum rolls* The beta pleated sheet!!!

Steph: cheh, what’s so hard? we are ‘tin choi’ (genius) ah! Don’t know why the lab session is until 12.15 p.m. We can eat soon!! *triumphant smile*

              Some moments of twisting of the molecule and mind-numbing sessions later, we finally came up with a almost-complete-alpha helix; we didn’t complete it because everyone already left and tat stressed steph out there was a lack of a ‘middle molecule’ for us to build the complete one. A few friends said bravo to us for the patience =)

             fOr your info, we had to use the exact bond length (converted in a table in the booklet) for say, C-H, C-N , )-H etc. Then there is the colour we had to follow for each element, not to mention, the bond angle (Carbon comes in tetrahedral and trigonal)

The quite-complete alpha helix.

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