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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.
i don’t really understand the first one: what’s that popsicle stick thing? what in biology is an exact rectangle?
It is almost surely the nanotube, though why it was decided not to give it a nice structure too I could not say.
ah, nanotube. of course.
by the way, i can’t see the comments on this post until i post a comment. weird. maybe problem with joyent. or with me.
ooo. maybe it’s a problem with firefox. i can see everything in IE.
Hm. The DNA scaffold looks like it might be speculation. The motor looks familiar, but also looks too big to visualize in anything but EM, which leaves the nanotube synthase as the only one with a solved structure?
My money bets:
Actual Structure: Nanotube synthase
Characterised: DNA scafold
Made Up: Rotary Motor.
My bets:
Actual Structure: Nanotube synthase
Characterised: DNA scafold
Made Up: Rotary Motor.