Protein Portraits

Protein: 3MAW

Structure of the Newcastle disease virus F protein in the post-fusion conformation.

Alright, well my Firefox crashed once while doing this. We’ll see if it handles the Flash Uploader this time.

I took some time between studying this weekend to work on my sculpture. Instead of trying to explain what I am doing in words I figured it would be easier to post photos instead. And then explain them.

Here is the Super Sculpey Firm on a cooking tray covered in aluminum foil for me to have a clean, non-stick surface to work on. I definitely recommend working on a easily moved surface and try to not work on lacquered wood surfaces (like my desk). I do like this Sculpey much better than the normal Sculpey, it is less “buttery” as you can tell I need a knife to cut it since tearing it is difficult.

I’m going to be designing the alpha-helices as bones (roughly modeled off of chicken bones) and then I will either wrap a second pieces of Sculpey for the coil, paint the coil on the “bones,” or make it out of wire. Or I might use feathers as the helices around the bones. I’m still debating, as sculpting the bones might take some time. I have the length of the helices mapped out in inches on my board so I don’t have to continually measure them with a ruler.

Here is a overall view of my general work station, as well as my parasitology notes (ahahaa…..).

I might not be in class on Monday, just a quick heads up.