Function
Glycogen is a branching polymer of large numbers of glucose units linked together. The structure is based on chains of glucose units with α(1→4) glycosidic bonds between carbon atoms 1 and 4 of each pair of units. These linkages are catalyzed by the enzyme glycogen synthase.
Every 10 to 14 glucose units, a side branch with an additional chain of glucose units occurs. The side chain attaches at carbon atom 6 of a glucose unit, and the linkage is termed an α(1→6) glycosidic bond. This connection is catalyzed by a branching enzyme. A branching enzyme attaches a string of seven glucose units to the sixth carbon of a glucose unit, usually in an interior location of the glycogen molecule.
Read more about this topic: Glycogen Branching Enzyme
Famous quotes containing the word function:
“The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“As a medium of exchange,... worrying regulates intimacy, and it is often an appropriate response to ordinary demands that begin to feel excessive. But from a modernized Freudian view, worrying—as a reflex response to demand—never puts the self or the objects of its interest into question, and that is precisely its function in psychic life. It domesticates self-doubt.”
—Adam Phillips, British child psychoanalyst. “Worrying and Its Discontents,” in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, p. 58, Harvard University Press (1993)
“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”
—Audre Lorde (1934–1992)