HK97 capsid
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 10 nm. One bead per amino acid. An E. coli is about thirty times longer.
Rap sheet
- Answers to
- HK97 capsid, or Head II.
- Height
- 66 nm, standing on a corner.
- Weight
- 21 attograms, empty.
- Build
- 420 copies of one protein, joined by 420 bonds into rings of five and six.
- Topology
- Linked rings, like chainmail. The first ever found in a protein.
- Habits
- Welds itself: a lysine, an asparagine, and a glutamate from a third part.
- Marks
- 1.8 nm thick at most. Its density map looks like a balloon.
- Weakness
- In the wild, one corner is a door: a 12-part portal.
- Last seen
- In a crystal, empty, grown in E. coli.
rings of protein in one shell: 12 of five, 60 of six.
You’ve never seen one.
The poster on the street
This is the photocopied wanted poster for HK97 capsid, No. 130 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.
Not a player yet? Join the Epic Quest: the real role-playing game of Molecular Reality, a nanopore lab, with the CEO as gamemaster.