Donkey bridge to remember amino acids?

[Monique]

lol, I hope that a donkey bridge is a used term in English? I'll explain it, just in case.. it is to make an associative link between things to be remembered.

Is there any easy way to learn the structures of all the 20 aminoacids and whether they are polar/nonpolar/charged?

It would be nice to be able to look at a missense mutation (one that changes the aminoacid of a codon) and predict by head whether that mutation will affect the characteristics of the protein or not.


I guess I can start with putting the structures on my notebook's background..

 

[selfAdjoint]

The only use of the term donkey bridge (in Latin pons asinorum) that I know is in connection with Euclid's geometry and his proof that if the angles at the base of a triangle are equal, then the triangle is isoceles. The construction in Euclid's original proof looks a little like a bridge, and in the middle ages this proof was the "cut" for eliminating students who just couldn't grok axiomatic geometry, so, "bridge of asses".

I assume that for you it has the meaning of a handy mnemonic?

 

[Monique]

Mnemonic? If that means the same thing as a donkey bridge (associative link for the not so smart).. Yes!

 

[Chemicalsuperfreak]

The best mnemonic devices are the ones you make up yourself. And let me tell you, the raunchier it is, the better. I don't know why, probably just some weird little quirk in the human brain. It helped me remember the common names for the saturated and unsaturated C10-C20 fatty acids.