Twenty tiny building blocks. Billions of proteins. Every hair, enzyme, and heartbeat — assembled from the same 20 amino acids that scientists have been obsessing over since 1806. Dive in.
Five interactive tools that make amino acid chemistry hands-on — whether you're studying, curious, or just want to beat your high score.
Paste any protein sequence — or build one by clicking amino acids — and get instant molecular weight, isoelectric point, and a hydrophobicity plot.
Open Analyzer →All 64 codons of the genetic code in a colour-coded interactive table. Click any codon to see what amino acid it encodes and link to the full story.
Explore Codons →Flip through all 20 amino acids. Each card reveals the discovery story, the most remarkable fact, and chemical data. Filter by category or shuffle.
Start Studying →Three clues, revealed one at a time. Guess early for maximum points. Can you identify all 20 from their stories alone? 10 rounds, 30 points maximum.
Play the Game →Ten questions on history, chemistry, and fascinating facts. Test what you know about the molecules that build every living thing on Earth.
Take the Quiz →Glycine is the smallest of the 20 standard amino acids, but don't let that fool you. It was discovered in 1820 when a French chemist boiled gelatin with sulfuric acid, named after its surprisingly sweet taste (Greek: glykys), and later found drifting through space inside a comet.
Chemists group amino acids by the character of their side chains. Each group has its own personality — and its own fascinating stories.
Aspartic acid & Glutamic acid. The taste of umami lives here.
Histidine, Arginine & Lysine. Positively charged and vital for DNA binding.
Including the disulfide-bond builder Cysteine and the comet-traveler Glycine.
Water-hating and structure-loving — Tryptophan's stunning indole ring lives here.
From a Nobel Prize won by accident to a molecule that spawned a global food debate — these are the stories science textbooks skip.
In 1908, a Japanese chemist tasted kombu seaweed broth and realized something extraordinary was happening that couldn't be explained by sweet, sour, salty, or bitter.
Every Thanksgiving, someone brings up tryptophan. Every year, the science gets mangled. Here's what's actually happening in that molecule with the stunning indole ring.
Glycine is the simplest amino acid. It has been discovered in meteorites, collected from a comet by NASA's Stardust mission, and detected drifting in interstellar gas clouds.
There is one amino acid that appears at the very beginning of virtually every protein ever made, in every organism on Earth. Its story is the story of how life reads its own instruction manual.
Named after a bladder stone. Capable of forming molecular handcuffs. The reason hair can be permanently curled. Cysteine is the most dramatic amino acid in the collection.
From 1806 to 1935: the complete timeline of how all 20 amino acids were found, named, and understood.
We've organized everything you want to know about amino acids — without the textbook numbness.
An interactive chart of all 20 amino acids, color-coded by chemistry. Click any cell to explore.
The fascinating, sometimes accidental, always human stories behind each amino acid's discovery.
Where do amino acids come from? Seeds, cheeses, meteorites — the answers might surprise you.
Test what you know with our amino acid quiz. No trick questions — just satisfying chemistry.
The interactive periodic chart is the best place to start. Each cell links to a full page with chemistry, history, and fascinating facts.
⬡ Open the Chart