Ciro Santilli defines a "model protein" as a protein which has been significantly used in the history of protein science, in analogy to the term model organism.
Key characteristics of model proteins include:
- they are easy to obtain and are stable
- they are important to medical applications
- they are small and easier to understand for early studies
Important model proteins include:
- insulin: as a peptide hormone, this was small. Also it was useful and widely available even at pharmacies, The Eighth Day of Creation says you could get it a Boots, a major British pharmacy chain, and as such was a natural choice for the first sequencing by Frederick Sanger published in 1951
- hemoglobin
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