Even though I keep a printout of a
beautiful reference guide from the Protein Data Bank above my bench, I guess I never really internalized the relative size DNA and proteins until I tried to crochet them side by side. I was originally hoping to represent each base and amino acid with an individual crochet stitch, but that would require scaling WAY down on the gauge for the protein. Laziness prevailed, and I represented the histones in these nucleosomes not as
ribbon diagrams but with a crude surface view of the entire octamer.
Along the way, I also came across these beautiful renderings of
ribosome tertiary structure that give a sense of the relative scale of protein secondary structure and nucleic acids.
Readers may note that this "DNA" has the wrong chirality. I know, I know. I've been kind of wanting to learn to crochet left-handed for a while now so I can more easily teach everyone...but this is definitely making it a higher priority.
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