Case No. 106 · the exotic forty · have you seen this molecule?

CsgG

the biofilm exporter that now reads DNA for a living

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

CsgG, front view, against a height chart in nanometers — FRONT

The suspect, from its real atomic coordinates. Drag to turn it. Height chart in nanometers, a line every 2 nm. The E. coli wearing it is about two hundred times longer.

Rap sheet

Answers to: Curli-specific gene G. Travels in nines.
Height: 9.5 nm, barrel up, cage down.
Weight: 430 zeptograms. Fat anchors extra.
Build: A 36-strand barrel on a cage, 12 nm across.
Marks: A 0.9 nm pinch, lined three rings deep: Y51, N55, F56.
Habits: Feeds unfolded curli protein out of the cell, to set as biofilm glue.
Fuel: None found. No ATP, no ion gradient. Entropy is the suspect.
Weakness: Long runs of one DNA letter. CsgF lends it a second pinch 2.5 nm up.
Last seen: In a sequencer on a lab bench, threading DNA.

2,300,000,000,000,000

of them in a milligram, nine parts to a pore.
You’ve never seen one. Your DNA may have.

CASE FILE: Goyal, P. et al. (2014) Structural and mechanistic insights into the bacterial amyloid secretion channel CsgG. Nature 516, 250–253.

The poster on the street

This is the photocopied wanted poster for CsgG, No. 106 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.