Oh Little Protein Molecule

(To the tune of “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem”) / Recording by Tim Karplus

Oh little protein molecule
You’re lovely and serene
With twenty zwitterions like
Cysteine and alanine

Your secondary structure
Has pitches and repeats
Arranged in alpha helices
And beta pleated sheets

The Ramachandran plots are
Predictions made to try
To tell the structures you can have
For angles phi and psi

And tertiary structure
Gives polypeptides zing
Because of magic that occurs
In protein fol-ding

A folded enzyme’s active
And starts to catalyze
When activators bind into
The allosteric sites

Some other mechanisms
Control the enzyme rates
By regulating synthesis
And placement of phosphates

And all the regulation
That’s found inside of cells
Reminds the students learning it
Of pathways straight from hell

So here’s how to remember
The phosphate strategies
They turn the GPb’s to a’s
And GSa’s to b’s