Nucleosome
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 2 nm. A cheek cell is about four thousand times wider.
Rap sheet
- Answers to
- Nucleosome. First booked as a “nu body.”
- Height
- 15 nm, one tail up. The spool alone: 11.
- Weight
- 330 zeptograms
- Build
- Eight histones (a frog’s, here), with human DNA wound 1.67 times around.
- Marks
- Floppy tails, which the cell tags with notes on which genes to use.
- Habits
- Spools your DNA: about six feet per cell, onto 30 million of them.
- Associates
- Peas and cows. Their histone H4s differ at 2 of 102 spots.
- First seen
- Under an electron microscope, as beads on a string.
- Last seen
- A 5 mL tube marked CHEEK in the freezer at HQ.
of them on a cheek swab, give or take.
Swabs vary a lot. You’ve never seen one.
The poster on the street
This is the photocopied wanted poster for Nucleosome, No. 97. 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.