Question

How many different polypeptides, each containing ten amino acids, can be made from the list of amino acids? How many different polypeptides, each containing 100 amino acids, can be made?

Short answer

$1.024\times {10}^{13}$numbers of polypeptides containing 10 amino acids and $1.3\times {10}^{130}$ numbers of polypeptides containing 100 amino acids are possible.

Step-by-step solution

Polypeptides

Polypeptides are the peptides that are formed by connecting ‘n’ number of amino acids.

Possible Polypeptides from 10 amino acids.

The list of amino acids contains 20 amino acids. As known, each amino acid is made from triple codons.

The number of polypeptides, each containing ten amino acids, which can be made from the list of amino acids is calculated as;

$$\begin{gathered} {20}^{10}=1024\times {10}^{10} \\ =1.024\times {10}^{13} \end{gathered}$$

Possible Polypeptides from 100 amino acids.

The number of polypeptides, each containing 100 amino acids, can be calculated as;

$$\begin{gathered} {20}^{100}=1.26\times {10}^{30}\times {10}^{100} \\ =1.3\times {10}^{130} \end{gathered}$$