Hypusine
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, ruled every 0.1 nm. A yeast cell is several thousand times wider.
Rap sheet
- Answers to
- Hypusine, for hydroxyputrescine + lysine: a guess at its parents.
- Height
- 1.4 nm, standing on end.
- Weight
- 0.39 zeptograms
- Build
- A lysine plus the tail end of a spermidine. Long, bendy, basic.
- Rarity
- One protein, eIF5A. One lysine: No. 50 in you, No. 51 in yeast.
- Habits
- Steadies the ribosome’s P-site tRNA so stubborn prolines can join.
- Relatives
- Bacteria skip it: their EF-P uses a beta-lysine, or a sugar.
- First seen
- Loose in cow brain, a decade before its protein turned up.
- Last seen
- On lysine 50 of eIF5A, in nearly every cell you have.
of them in one yeast cell, give or take, all on the same lysine of the same protein.
You’ve never seen one.
The poster on the street
This is the photocopied wanted poster for Hypusine, No. 107 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.