3 ms·
I'm estimating roughly 90-ish characters in a row, roughly 40 rows encoding the spike protein. So about 3600 base pairs. There are 3 base pairs per amino acid,
by andagainagain 6y ago
I'm estimating roughly 90-ish characters in a row, roughly 40 rows encoding the spike protein. So about 3600 base pairs. There are 3 base pairs per amino acid, so That's 1200 amino acids.
For comparison, the smallest chain that they technically call a protein is 100 amino acids that's an arbitrary limit to separate proteins from enzymes. So this thing isn't tiny tiny.
But Titin (also called connectin), a giant protein responsible for passive elasticity in mucles, is ~27,000-35,000 amino acids. So this thing isn't even close to the biggest proteins out there.
- flobosg 6y ago> that's an arbitrary limit to separate proteins from enzymes Do you mean “to separate polypeptides from proteins”? Enzymatic activity has nothing to do with size. For example, one of the smallest enzymes in humans has 62 amino acid residues. And, under certain conditions, even single amino acids can be catalytic. But yeah, the polypeptide-protein threshold can get fuzzy, especially with the recent advances in miniprotein characterization.
- andagainagain 6y agoyes, that is what I meant. It's been a long time since I've used that info. The story I remember was that Insulin was the first protein that was sequenced, which is funny because it was before they made the distinction. It's actually too small to be considered a protein now.