Just like Carbohydrates and Vitamins plus minerals, Protein is another essential nutrient. Protein builds up, maintains, and replaces the tissues in your body. Your muscles, your organs, and your immune system are made up mostly of protein. Protein has multi functions, there are transport proteins, anti bodies, structural proteins, snake venom etc. Your body uses the protein you eat to make lots of specialized protein molecules that have specific jobs.
What are Proteins????
Proteins are polymer chains made of amino acids bonded by peptide bonds. There are mainlt 4 structures of proteins as primary structure, secondary structure, tertiary structure and quaternary structure. Primary structure is a single chain of amino acids, secondary structure is two chains of amino acid chains twisted together forming shapes like alpha helix or beta pleat.Tertiary contains 3 amino acid chains and quaternary structure has 4 amino acid chains.
Amino acids can be divided into either essential amino acids or non-essential amino acids. The essential amino acids, which must be obtained from food sources, are leucine, isoleucine, valine, lysine, threonine, tryptophan, methionine, phenylalanine and histidine. On the other hand, non-essential amino acids can be made by the body from other amino acids. The non-essential amino acids are arginine, alanine, asparagine, aspartic acid, cysteine, glutamine, glutamic acid, glycine, proline, serine, and tyrosine.