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Biological structures as diverse as skin, hair, spider webs, silk cocoons, connective tissue, and some alga1 cell walls share a common property: they consist mainly of structural proteins. Some of these proteins have been studied in detail and have contributed greatly to our understanding of protein structure. Silk fibroin, for example, is the model protein for the 0-pleated sheet secondary structure, collagen for a triplestranded helix. The amino acids Gly and Pro (or Hyp) are frequently found to be major constituents of these structural proteins and, therefore, appear to be well suited as building blocks for structural proteins.
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Beat Keller (1993) studied this question.
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