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Does simply any organic compound containing a single carborn with an -NH2 and -COOH constitute an amino acid?
Or must the molecule of which the carbon (bound with -NH2 and -COOH) is a part have to be a hydrocarbon, a carbohydrate, or some other more specific variety of organic compound? I have seen multiple definitions now, some more encompassing than others.
Thank you very much for your help!
An amino acid, by definition, only has to contain an NH2 (amino) group and a COOH (carboxyl) group. You could have the craziest molecule in existence and as long as it fulfilled these criteria, it would be an amino acid. Technically, even a protein with tertiary structure could be considered as a single giant amino acid.
The specific kind you're probably interested in, though, are alpha-amino acids. This means that there is only one carbon atom between the C of the COOH group and the N of the NH2 group, and it is to this "alpha carbon" that substituent groups are attached. 20 of these occur naturally (well, technically 19, since proline's alpha carbon group wraps to the amino group) but there could be thousands of possibilities of alpha-amino acids, like making a 100-carbon chain the alpha carbon substituent.
So to sum up your answer, as long as there's at least on carbon in between the two functional groups, you have an amino acid of some kind.
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