Reading List

We often get requests for reading lists that can be used in preparation for your studies. As a postgraduate course we do not really teach much from textbooks, mostly we will recommend papers and reviews, or sometimes technical manuals, to view.

There are a few concepts that we would hope you were fully familiar with before you start the course as that will allow you to make full use of the new knowledge, we are presenting to you. So here is a (non-exhaustive) list of the concepts that we would expect you to understand:

• Protein structure, the meaning of Primary, Secondary, Tertiary and Quaternary protein structure, or more simply how a protein sequence folds into secondary structures, and they subsequently fold into domains and associate into multi domain proteins.  
• You should also know the structure of the bases that comprise DNA and the structures that DNA forms.  
• Amino acid structure, you should know the chemical structure of all the common amino acids, appreciate their differing ionization states, how they might form hydrogen bonds with each other, with solvent and with other molecules. You should also know the single letter codes for each amino acid, so that you can rapidly scan through the compact representation of a protein sequence.  
• There are also many common molecules that occur in biological systems (e.g. ATP, glutathione, NADH etc.) and the ability to recognise their structures would be helpful.  
• You should understand the general aspects of protein kinetics, so what is meant by an Equilibrium constant and in particular what the dissociation constant K_D means in the context of a Receptor/Ligand (R/L) binding event, how these relate to general terms of affinity and how this relates to general concepts of drug binding like IC₅₀ and the free energy involved in these processes.  
• Finally, there are general concepts related to Acid/Base equilibria. Many protein characteristics and functions are directly linked to pH and concentration, so you should be familiar with concepts like pH the related acid dissociation constant K_a or as it is more often represents pK_a, and the isoelectric point (pI) of a protein.

A revision of these concepts will increase your ability to take on new material we will present.