Bluenoise

Hey all and welcome. Hope you like it here

I'm not sure why they call the R part of those carboxylic acid examples a "Radical", it's just an alkyl group. A possibility maybe that they consider it a radical since the carbon is donating only one electron to the bond from it's valence shell and that the R group is only donating one as well. So if you treat them seperatley only posessing the electron that is originally theirs, I guess you could refer to them as radicals. But it's a stretch and is pretty misleading. Letting R stand for "Rest" makes a hell of alot more sense. Since that is how it's used. And yeah that OP structure represents a hydrogen bonding formation found in a type of protein secondary structure called an "Anti-paralle Beta sheet", with the R groups represesnting amino acid side chain.

Hi I'm bluenoise as the title says. You can call me Casper. I'm currently majoring in Biochemistry in Canada, though I'd like to think that my interests touch upon every area of science (probably not though). Currently I've been lurking on these forums just reading the occasional thread as I've been pretty swamped latley. But I'd love to post more and discuss once I get some freedom.