Talk:Alpha chain

Could this be a subject?

There was brief article here [1]; I'm assuming that any notable content there was merged or already included in T-cell receptor before this page alpha chain was marked for deletion.

It has now been proposed for deletion because it can mean a part of the T-cell receptor, or the Fibrinogen alpha chain, or integrin alpha chain, the list can go on. So unless a substantial disambiguation page is made, simply redirecting 'Alpha chain' to the T-cell receptor page isn't exactly accurate. Sorry for rambling, but "Alpha chain" isn't really a topic.

I think a page has been created here a couple of times in good faith to provide info for redlinks in articles to alpha chain (beta chain also gets linked).

Two questions:

1. Is Fibrinogen alpha chain the only alpha chain that deserves its own article? If so then I guess there would be no benefit in creating a disambiguation page, because any other articles that linked to it e.g. T-cell receptor would only be disambiguated by linking back to themselves, or rather by removing the links. The current link in the latter article to the empty page beta chain could be removed in this way.
2. Is there anything in common between the different alpha chains in various cells etc? Where there are two chains, are they called alpha and beta arbitrarily, or is alpha always the longer one? Should there be an underlying article or section somewhere that covers this meaning of "chain", e.g. within the article protein structure? If so then alpha chain and beta chain could helpfully be redirected there. – Fayenatic (talk) 11:50, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I study biochemistry at university, and from my understanding, ‘alpha’ is used mainly to describe the first subunit of a multi-subunit protein complex, first usually meaning the first to be discovered. The term ‘chain’ is often used frequently to describe any peptide (as in peptide chains), and so is a very general term.

Therefore, there are an extraordinarily large number of peptides that can be termed ‘alpha chains’, many of which are not ‘famous’ like the fibrinogen alpha chain or haemoglobin alpha subunit (which some call alpha chain), and also the trimeric G-protein alpha subunit.

So if you want to give alpha chain a page, in my opinion, it would be like giving ‘coloured stuff’ a page. It is too general and the words are too ambiguous for it to be granted a page.

Kinkreet (talk) 02:38, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Thank you; if it's as vague as that, then I have no objection to deleting the page.

However, I'm not sure whether that knocks out my second idea. As a person with (evidently) no knowledge of this area, I thought that this meaning of "chain" would be worth documenting in Wikipedia, just as a sentence or two within an appropriate section of a larger article such as protein structure, peptide or peptide sequence. If that was done, then "alpha chain" and "beta chain" could be a redirect to that section, just to help other readers know what the words "alpha chain" refer to. – Fayenatic (talk) 14:45, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

In that case, I agree. But I still stand on the fact that alpha chain should not be an article in itself, but maybe just a brief statement stating what it is, and then having a list of common alpha chains. Kinkreet (talk) 12:10, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

I also agree, that it shouldn't be an individual article.

Couldn't it be redirected to Protein quaternary structure? Carroll D. (talk) 23:33, 26 February 2023 (UTC)