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Monday, November 20, 2006

Name This Molecule #2

 

Twenty-three different amino acids can be incorporated into polypeptides by the translation machinery. They all have their own codons.

The molecule on the left is one of the 23, which one?

13 comments :

Anonymous said...

That would appear to be the unusual amino acid 'Pyrrolysine', encoded by the (amber stop) codon UAG. It's been a long time since Biochem - I had to wiki this one.

Anonymous said...

D'oh! J.I. Brown wins.

Thumbs up for the Archaea reference, anyway.

minimalist said...

Silly man, why put the answer in the name of the image itself? Is this an open-book test, or what? ;)

Hopefully this leads into a more in-depth post on Archaean biochemistry. But you know, proteins are so BO-ring! Why not something on their unique *lipids*, especially in the thermophiles?

Anonymous said...

Remember when that twit perfesser at University of Chicago lawschool was making a case for intelligent design? Alschuler or something like that?

Right off the bat he made one of the stupidest comments ever. In a discussion about life on earth, he wrote, "Setting aside the anomaly of microbes ..."

LOL!!!!! Creationists are so dumb.

Anonymous said...

Selenocysteine is the bossest amino acid.

Just fyi.

Anonymous said...

"Name This Molecule"

I name thee: Rebecca.

Anonymous said...

" Selenocysteine is the bossest amino acid."

I second that movement. lol

Larry Moran said...

Hmmmm .... now that you've identified the 23rd amino acid without much difficulty, and named the 22nd amino acid as well, what's the formal name of the 21st amino acid?

Anonymous said...

Are we talking about p-aminophenylalanine? As in this paper?

Larry Moran said...

Nope. I'm talking about a natural amino acid.

Anonymous said...

now that you've identified the 23rd amino acid without much difficulty, and named the 22nd amino acid as well, what's the formal name of the 21st amino acid?

Is this the "pathetic level of detail" that Bill Dimbski was referring to?

I admit that it's irritating. ;)

Larry Moran said...

Aha!

You don't know the answer, do you?

Ask your father. :-)

Anonymous said...

(...emails on other subject... mentions this problem...)

(Answer comes back from LM...)

'N-formylmethionine'

(Bangs head on desk.)