Hydrophobicity of residues

Simon Brocklehurst (smb@bioch.ox.ac.uk)
Mon, 29 Jan 1996 20:18:30 +0000 (GMT)

OK... so we're now into the first "serious" aspects of protein
structure. After you've looked through the section 2 course
material (particularly the properties of the amino acids),
I'd like to invite you to think about the following, seemingly
simply questions...

1) Which amino acid residue do you consider to be
the most hydrophobic in nature?

2) Which amino acid residue would do consider to
be the least hydrophobic in nature?

Everyone should have an opinion on this - so it would be good
to see some choices and _reasons_ for those choices as follow-ups
in this dicussion group.
Don't be worried about getting the answer "wrong". For one thing,
after the discussion (if it takes off, that is ;-)), you might even
decide that there aren't any "right" answers to these questions.

Some of you might like to at least think about the answer to
the question below... even if you don't want to discuss it on the
listserv.

3) Which amino acid residue is most often considered to be
the most hydrophilic in published "hydrophobicity" or
"hydropathy" scales? Do you think they came up with
the "right" answer?

So... it's over to you! Don't let me down guys - send in your thoughts
to the list!

-- Simon
_____________________________________________________________________________
|
| ,_ o Simon M. Brocklehurst,
| / //\, Oxford Centre for Molecular Sciences, Department of Biochemistry,
| \>> | University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
| \\, E-mail: smb@bioch.ox.ac.uk | WWW: http://www.ocms.ox.ac.uk/~smb/
|____________________________________________________________________________