Well, I mentioned that I wanted to choose a protein with some connection to music. After doing a bit of browsing around on Google Scholar, I came across the structural protein harmonin. This protein helps to maintain the structure of stereocillia, the small hairs in the inner ear that detect sound waves and ultimately make hearing possible.
Here is an image of one domain of the protein. It incorporates a decent number of beta strands, but it contains relatively few alpha helices.
I had mentioned that I may consider wrapping guitar strings around drum sticks to form the alpha helices; however, since the helices in this protein are relatively short and drum sticks are very sturdy, I will likely choose something else to form the alpha helices, which will allow me to use drum sticks as part of the scaffold instead.
Materials being considered:
*Guitar strings to represent chains not organized into secondary structures
*Guitar picks, glued end-to-end in an arrow-like fashion, to represent beta strands
*Speaker wire to represent alpha helices (I may swap the role of guitar string and speaker wire, as guitar strings would probably keep the helical shape longer and better)
*Drum sticks as the major structural material (i.e. pillars to hold up the model)
*Saxophone reeds as the minor structural material
*LOTS of Super-Glue!
Let me know what you think!
Sounds like a great idea 🙂
Speaker-ing of alpha helices, I checked the PDB… 2KBQ is listed in the database as the structure of the N-terminal domain of harmonin. Lo and behold, the N-terminal domain is **full** of alpha helices. You may need those guitar strings after all!
True, but it has no beta-strands. I was thinking about doing both domains, which would give me a decent number of both types of secondary structures, though I haven’t yet found any images of how the two domains interact with each other or how they would look together, so it seems like that would just be my best guess.
Based on a new idea I’ve had with the overall portrait, I think I will be using speaker wire for primary peptide chains and guitar strings for alpha helices after all.