Amino acid (essential 9)

Definition

Amino acid (essential 9) in plain English

Amino acids are the 20 building blocks your body strings together to make proteins — think of them as the letters your body uses to spell out every muscle, enzyme, and antibody. Your body can manufacture most of them from scratch, but there are 9 it simply cannot build, so you MUST eat them. That's what 'essential' means here: essential-in-your-diet, not essential-as-in-important (they're all important). A handy way to remember all nine: 'PVT TIM HaLL' — Phenylalanine, Valine, Threonine, Tryptophan, Isoleucine, Methionine, Histidine, Leucine, Lysine.

Learn these first

• Electronegativity
• Peptide bond

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• Action potential
• Active vs passive transport
• Allele
• Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP)
• Autonomic nervous system
• Beta-oxidation
• Cardiac cycle
• Cell cycle checkpoints
• Chemiosmosis
• Codon