AA structures

I recall last year a senior biochem major told me that she had forgotten the structure of the amino acids over the summer DESPITE THE FACT THAT SHE WAS DOING A THESIS ON PROTEIN BIOCHEMISTRY*. This horrified me. She was a great student, a hard worker, got good grades, etc. I guess people give memorizing structures a bad rep, but I think if you get a degree in biochemistry, you should fucking have the amino acid structures in your head, IMHO.

So today, I decided to test myself to see if I was being too judgmental. I needed to memorize the structures of the amino acids and the one letter codes last fall for structural biochem as well as the nitrogenous bases, so it's been several months since someone demanded that I have this knowledge at my fingertips. I guess took another biochemistry course after that, and I look at a lot of nat. product structures, so it's not like I just shut my brain off to biochem and peptides since I took that course. So I drew them all out from memory today just to test myself.

And I knew all of them still. All 20 of them right, suckers! Well, the one letter code for aspartate slipped my mind briefly, which is D, by the way. And I stupidly dropped a hydrogen drawing a couple of the bases. But I still knew which places had carbonyls and which had amine functionalities.

So phew. I guess I still feel justified in calling myself a biochemist, and in holding people to this standard. Is this an unreasonable standard? I dunno. I don't think so.

*okay, it was enzyme kinetics, so she wasn't exactly looking at her protein structures all the time--just dealing with bi-bi ping pong shit, but still. Still. Degree in biochemistry.