Academics Andre's Research Biocuriosities Books Graduate School History of Science Hot off the Press Igor's Research Interdisciplinarity Molecule of the Month Open Access Philip's Research Philosophy of Science Physics Physicsworld.com
Backreaction Ceclia's Blog at PHD Comics Cocktail Party Physics Cosmic Variance The Daily Transcript Easternblot Everyday Scientist The Evilutionary Biologist Freelancing Science The Futile Cycle Good Math, Bad Math iMechanica in singulo Incoherently Scattered Ponderings Juniorprof Klara Stefflova Life of a Lab Rat The Loom Metadatta Mixed States Morning Coffee Physics Not Even Wrong Notes from the biomass Notional Slurry OpenScience Project Pharyngula PLoS Blog Ponderings of a fool Recombinants The Sandwalk SciAm Observations ScienceBlogs Scientific Clearing House Shtetl-Optimized Three-toed Sloth Uncertain Principles What's New by Bob Park
It is easy to become enamored with cartoon molecular structures, and it is getting increasly trivial to generate these images without any real data to support them. With that in mind, peruse these structures*, depicting a nanotube synthase, a rotary motor, and a cube-shaped DNA scaffold:
Of these three structures, only one has an actual crystal structure that can be found in the PDB, one is pure speculation, and the third has been synthesized and characterised, but there is no atomic-resolution structural data so far available.
Can you tell which is which?
* Reference in an upcoming post, I don’t want to give the answer away.
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
