What Is the Function of a Dipeptide?

Transcript

Hi, I'm Robin Higgins, and this is "what is the function of a dipeptide?" Okay, so a dipeptide is just two amino acids joined together by a peptide bond. So, their basic structure looks like this. So, what you have here is glycylglycine. So, you have your two different acids and you have them connected by the peptide bond. So, there's not really any one set function for dipeptides. It really depends, and so, you can imagine, if you have all your different amino acids, there's gonna be hundreds of different combinations of dipeptides that you can make. And, some are naturally occurring and some are only made synthetically. And, so just to give you an example, carnosine is a dipeptide. And, that's found mostly in bird, fish and mammal tissue, and people think that it's responsible for antioxidation, and controlling cellular pH. So, that's naturally occurring. On the other hand, you have another dipeptide, aspartame, and this is used as an artificial sweetener. So, you can see there's not really one set, function for dipeptides, it can very extremely, all the way from antioxidation, to just, you know, sweetening your coffee. And, so, there's hundreds of others and some of them have basically no function, and some of them are also very important. So, it depends on what particular dipeptide you're interested in studying. I'm Robin Higgins and this is "what is the function of a dipeptide?"

Robin Higgins graduated with a B.S in Chemistry from Emory University 2010, and has just recently received her M.S in Chemistry from the University of California Los Angeles.

×