if there are only 20 different common amino acids why is it possible to have thousands of different types of p

Answer 1

Because you can have thousands of different random combinations

Answer 2

Think about the amino acids like the alphabet. We have only 26 letters in the alphabet (assuming you're anglosaxone) but you can combine millions of combinations to make millions of words regardless of whether they have a meaning or not. So it's the same thing with the amino acids, you can have Arginine with Leucine, that's 1 combination, you can have Arginine, Isoleucine, Aspartate, that's another combo, so you can add and subtract anything you want and make a polypeptide chain or a protein. So, it's not thousands really, it's millions upon millions of combinations that you can make.
Just for the record also, scientists are talking about having found a 21st amino acid but not quite official yet (just thought you'd want to know :))
Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Thousands of proteins exist because proteins are chains of amino acids ranging in length from just a few amino acids to several thousand. Since changing one amino acid changes what protein is being synthesized, and since some proteins are thousands of amino acids long, there are an infinite number of possible proteins.

Answer 4

The different combinations and order of the amino aicds allow for the formation of many different proteins. The side chains on the amino acids have various functions that are important in how the protein is formed.

Answer 5

In the English language we have 26 letters, yet we have thousands of words we can make from these letters. With the same alphabet, we can also get thousands of words in German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Latin, Italian, etc.
Proteins are long strings of amino acids that can be thousands of units long and a myriad of possible combinations.

Answer 6

The number of proteins differ only in the possible combinations of nitrogenous bases in the nucleic acids. So, we can have many proteins though there are so many amino acids. See that the amino acids are different from nucleic acids.

Answer 7

Because of the combinations they can make up. There is an exponential amount of combinations that can be made with just 20 a. acids. And each combination codes for a particular protein with a specific function.

Answer 8

You can have the following number of combinations :
20*/19*18*17*16*15*14*13*12*11*10*9*8*7*6*5*4*3*2*1=
Total up and see.how many thousnads of combinations can be made of these twenty substances ,

Answer 9

suppose you have two alphabets a and b
strings of two letters which you can make are
aa, ab, ba, bb-4 strings
if you had three,a,b,c
aaa,bbb,ccc,aab,aba,baa,abc,bac,cab,bba,bab,abb,cca,cac,cca
15 strings
thus on increasing 1 letter you got 11 more strings.
hence if there are 20 amino acids it is possible to make thousands of proteins.
moreover, in formation of proteins, there is no restriction on how many out of 20 proteins can join to form protein.
every different combination in numbers as well as type yields new protein.