Alanine

Alanine is an α-amino acid with a methyl side chain. It is a common protein building block and participates in the glucose–alanine cycle.

Amino acid: An organic molecule containing amino and carboxyl functional groups; protein amino acids also have a distinctive side chain. Alanine is one of the amino acids, distinguished by its methyl side chain.
Glucose–alanine cycle: A metabolic cycle that carries nitrogen from muscle to liver as alanine while returning carbon for glucose production. Alanine is the cycle’s transport form for muscle-derived amino nitrogen.
Proteinogenic amino acid: An amino acid that cells use as a building block during protein synthesis. Alanine is encoded by the genetic code and incorporated into proteins.
Adolph Strecker: A German chemist known for developing a synthesis of α-amino acids from aldehydes, ammonia, and hydrogen cyanide. His amino-acid synthesis helped establish routes to compounds such as alanine.
Alanine stereoisomers: The L and D forms of alanine, which differ in the spatial arrangement around its chiral α-carbon. Protein synthesis uses L-alanine, while D-alanine occurs in bacterial cell walls.
Alanine transaminase: An enzyme that reversibly transfers an amino group between alanine and α-ketoglutarate, producing pyruvate and glutamate. It catalyzes the key alanine–pyruvate conversion in the glucose–alanine cycle.
Genetic code: The rules by which nucleotide triplets in messenger RNA specify amino acids or translation stop signals. Four codons specify alanine during translation.
Strecker synthesis: An organic reaction that converts an aldehyde into an α-amino acid through an aminonitrile intermediate. It provides a classic chemical route for synthesizing alanine.
Glycine: The simplest amino acid, with hydrogen as its side chain and no chiral α-carbon. Unlike alanine, glycine lacks a side-chain carbon and is achiral.
Pyruvate: A three-carbon molecule formed at the end of glycolysis and used in several metabolic pathways. Transamination interconverts alanine and pyruvate without changing their three-carbon skeleton.

Linked from 4 pages