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Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Monday's Molecule #139

 
The molecule is 4-sulfonamide-2',4'-diaminobenzol or "Prontosil," a potent antibiotic. Gerhard Domagk received the Nobel Prize for developing Prontosil as a treatment against bacterial infections.

The overall winner is Markus-Frederik Bohn of the Lehrstuhl für Biotechnik in Erlangen, Germany. The undergraduate winner is Jason Oakley a biochemistry student at the University of Toronto.



Name this molecule. The common name will do. Briefly describe what it does.

There's a Nobel Prize directly connected to this molecule. If you can name the molecule then you can find the Nobel Laureate(s).

The first person to identify the molecule and name the Nobel Laureate(s) wins a free lunch. Previous winners are ineligible for six weeks from the time they first won the prize.

There are only four ineligible candidates for this week's reward: Philip Johnson of the University of Toronto, Ben Morgan of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Frank Schmidt of the University of Missouri and Joshua Johnson of Victoria University in Australia.

Frank and Joshua have agreed to donate their free lunch to an undergraduate. Consequently, I have an extra free lunch for a deserving undergraduate so I'm going to award an additional prize to the first undergraduate student who can accept it. Please indicate in your email message whether you are an undergraduate and whether you can make it for lunch. If you can't make it for lunch then please consider donating it to someone who can in the next round.

THEME:

Nobel Laureates
Send your guess to Sandwalk (sandwalk (at) bioinfo.med.utoronto.ca) and I'll pick the first email message that correctly identifies the molecule(s) and names the Nobel Laureate(s). Note that I'm not going to repeat Nobel Prizes so you might want to check the list of previous Sandwalk postings by clicking on the link in the theme box.

Correct responses will be posted tomorrow.

Comments will be blocked for 24 hours. Comments are now open.



1 comment :

charlie wagner said...

"Today, we know that horizontal gene transfer is a powerful evolutionary force in the microbial world, well-documented in the phylogenetic record, and one whose ecological significance is only beginning to be fully understood.... The power of horizontal gene transfer is so great that it is a major puzzle to understand why it would be that the eukaryotic world would turn its back on such a wonderful source of genetic novelty and innovation. The exciting answer, bursting through decades of dogmatic prejudice, is that it hasn’t. There are now compelling documentations of horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotes, not only in plants, protists, and fungi, but in animals (including mammals) as well. The evolutionary implications have not yet been worked out, but we are confident that a fully worked out theory of the evolutionary process is required in order to properly meet the challenges posed initially by microbiology." — Microbiologists/physicists Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfeld

Read the whole paper HERE:

http://tinyurl.com/yczrw8e

Darwinists take note...