Nickel-pincer cofactor
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. Mugshot: the crystal structure, cut free at the enzyme’s lysine. The bacterium that makes it is a few thousand times longer.
Rap sheet
- Answers to
- NPN, short for nickel-pincer nucleotide.
- Height
- 1.0 nm, on its phosphate.
- Weight
- 0.78 zeptograms.
- Build
- An SCS pincer around one nickel(II).
- Habits
- Mirrors lactic acid. Hydride suspected.
- Associates
- LarC, the first cyclometallase found in nature, snaps the nickel in.
- Prior art
- Chemists first made pincers in the 1970s. Bacteria never said a word.
- Weakness
- Falls apart out of its enzyme, even at −80 °C.
- Last seen
- Inside a bacterium that sours sauerkraut and pickles.
proteins are used up, a sulfur atom apiece, to build each one.
You’ve never seen one.
The poster on the street
This is the photocopied wanted poster for Nickel-pincer cofactor, No. 108 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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