This is great, the official reasoning behind the IUPAC animo acid one-letter codes is based on a lot of the ways I originally memorised them.

W is the bulkiest letter for the bulkiest residue, and lysine was assigned K because it's the letter before L.

#biology

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@multimeric Neat! I wonder what the “linguistic reasons” for avoiding J are?

@askennard @multimeric
Maybe that J is a derivative of I (j and i used to be the same letter, just stylistic variants) - and in many typefaces they are difficult to distinguish?

@johannes_lehmann @askennard @multimeric

Maybe it's because J can be pronounced Huh or Yuh or Juh depending on language.

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