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" A dose of the venom contains only a few molecules of the neurotoxin, which has a high molecular weight--in fact, the molecules are large enough to be seen und
by cc439 12y ago
" A dose of the venom contains only a few molecules of the neurotoxin, which has a high molecular weight--in fact, the molecules are large enough to be seen under an ordinary microscope."
Does anyone have another source for this, maybe a photo? I spent some time looking around but I can't find anything relevant and it seems a little hard to believe.
- dwhly 12y agoUnless the molecular weight is about 10 pentillion (?) you ain't gonna see diddly! Avogadro's number is a big thing. (6 x 10^23). Now agreed that you don't need a mole of something (especially w/ a high molecular weight) to be able to see it in a microscope. But it's probably at least w/in 4 to 5 orders of magnitude of the right number.
- chc 12y agoIf you mean 10^18, it's a quintillion.
- drjesusphd 12y agoDNA is a molecule, and under the right conditions, you can see it under a microscope as chromosomes.
- ealloc 12y agoIt's wrong, the molecules are many orders of magnitude smaller than is possible to see. The main black widow venom is alpha-Latrotoxin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latrotoxin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latrotoxin), which is a 130 kDa protein according to wikipedia. That's large for a protein but there are bigger. Eukaryotic ribosomes are around 2500 kDa, but even they are completely invisible at 20 nm wide, and there are a thousands-millions of them per cell.