Alpha-amylase

This enzyme in your spit chops starch into sugar. That is why bread starts to taste sweet if you chew it for a while.

Fun fact

Each amylase chops up about a thousand starch links every second.

Words to know

enzyme
starch
digestion

NGSS alignment

MS-LS1-7Food, energy, and growth
MS-LS1-3Body as a system

Structure

Rendered in FoldLens Junior from AlphaFold Database entry P04745. See the underlying prediction at alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/entry/P04745.

About this surface

This page is the canonical share URL for the FoldLens Junior Alpha-amylase entry. Educational platforms can embed it via the standard OEmbed protocol — the discovery link is in the page head, the JSON body is at /junior/oembed/alpha-amylase.json, and the query endpoint at /junior/oembed?url=…&format=json redirects to the same body.