Triglycerides
triglycerides?
are they built from amino acids, carboxyl acids, sugars, nucleotides or gycerol and fatty acids? how many fatty acid chains do tryglycerides and phospholipid contain, respectivley?
Public Comments
- They are built from Gycerol and fatty acids. Chain lengths of the fatty acids in naturally occurring triglycerides can be of varying lengths but 16, 18 and 20 carbons are the most common. Natural fatty acids found in plants and animals are typically composed only of even numbers of carbon atoms due to the way they are bio-synthesised from acetyl CoA.
- Triglycerides are made of glycerol and fatty acids. Each of the three hydroxyl groups of glycerol is esterified with one fatty acid. So three fatty acids per glycerol group. In phospholipids, at least glycerophospholipids, the first fatty acid is replace with a phosphocholine group or a phosphatidylethanolamine group or a phosphatidylserine group, so phospholipids are made of glycerol, two fatty acids and one other group. There are many other phospholipids, however, of which some don't even have a glycerol backbone, and some only have one fatty acid (sphingomyelin, for example).
