Epic Quest Bio The case files
Case No. 115 · the exotic forty · have you seen this molecule?

Oblin-1

the protein of a genome nobody knew was there

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

Oblin-1, front view, against a height chart in nanometers
FRONT
Oblin-1, side view
SIDE · Obelisk_000001

The suspect, from its real atomic coordinates. Drag to turn it. Height chart in nanometers, ruled every 0.2 nm. Ten thousand end to end would span a human hair. Mugshot: its discoverers’ AlphaFold model.

Rap sheet

Answers to
Oblin-1. Old case files: COR_alpha_ORF-1.
Height
8.4 nm, standing on end. Allegedly.
Weight
39 zeptograms, on paper.
Build
Two helix bundles in a beta-sheet clasp. The last helix won’t sit still.
Marks
Its most conserved part is the one bit the computer couldn’t fold.
Habits
Its gene zips itself into a hairpin, half the obelisk.
Associates
Kin in half the mouths sampled, and in every ocean.
Last seen
As a gene, in human gut RNA. In person: never.
0

of them have ever been isolated or imaged. The mugshot is a prediction.
You’ve never seen one. Neither has anyone else.

CASE FILE: Zheludev, I. N. et al. (2024) Viroid-like colonists of human microbiomes. Cell 187, 6521–6536.e18.

The poster on the street

The wanted poster for Oblin-1

This is the photocopied wanted poster for Oblin-1, No. 115 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.