What knowledge have you connected with past knowledge?

As we learned from the first post, biochemistry is a multidisciplinary view of the molecular nature of life. This class has overlapped with the information presented in several classes that I have attended in the past. Biology presented the cellular structure and function of plants and animals. General chemistry provided a view of the interactions of individual molecules to create larger molecules. Organic chemistry presented carbon bonded functional groups and their interactions. All of these concepts have been revisited in our initial studies of biochemistry.

Find a protein using PDB explorer - describe your protein, including what disease state or other real-world application it has.

Utilizing the key word diabetes in the pdblite.org the site provided an article with a protein. The code associated with the protein is 1kzw. It is described as the human intestinal fatty acid binding protein which binds lipids in the cytosol of enterocytes. It is a naturally occurring nucleotide polymorphism.
This protein exhibits secondary traits of helixes and pleated sheets (visualized as green crayons and tan arrows respectively on diagram). It has no subunits and therefore no quaternary traits.
The amino acid sequence would be useful for research in comparing the structure and function of one sequence to that of another. Similar sequences may combine, react, substitute in the same way therefore allowing for predictions of unknown or underresearched sequences.

On the pdblite.org site two views of the molecule are available. The all atoms shows the entire molecule including side chains whereas the backbone view does not show the side chains.