A Protein Alpha Helix
By Charles Xie ✉
An alpha helix is a sequence of amino acids in a protein that are twisted into a coil. It is the most common secondary structure of proteins. The discovery of the alpha helix was considered as a key contribution of Linus Pauling that led to his Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954. This page shows a molecular dynamics simulation of an alpha helix. The helix is shown in the Cartoon mode with temperature coloring that represents the average kinetic energy of the residues.
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