Beta-flower protein
File sealed
The detectives are still writing this one up. The poster and the facts are below; the film and the interrogation room open soon.
Booking photographs
The suspect, from its real atomic coordinates. Drag to turn it. Height chart in nanometers, a line every 0.5 nm. Mugshot: an AlphaFold model, face on and side on; phenylalanines dark. A lawn daisy is about five million times wider.
Rap sheet
- Answers to
- A0A494VZL1. Officially “uncharacterized.”
- Height
- 4.7 nm, petals and all.
- Weight
- 18 zeptograms.
- Build
- 96 amino acids, ten short strands, one shallow barrel.
- Marks
- Dark phenylalanines tip all five petals.
- Associates
- No kin by sequence; 43 distant cousins by shape.
- First seen
- On a screen. “It looks like a flower,” its finders wrote.
- Status
- A prediction, pLDDT 96. No experimental structure on file.
- Last seen
- In the genome of a bacterium from a freshwater lake in Korea.
predicted proteins, give or take, in the database it was found in.
You’ve never seen one. Neither has the Protein Data Bank.
The poster on the street
This is the photocopied wanted poster for Beta-flower protein, No. 125 of the exotic forty. They were made for noticeboards around Boston, Cambridge and the rest of the east coast.
Found one? Scan its QR code with your phone. If you're a signed-in player, the sighting goes on your record with +1 XP.
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