Hello.
I am very excited about the prospect of taking a more creative approach to the life sciences.
I really hope to find a protein used in the same pea plants that were originally used in Mendelian Genetics. My first thoughts are that I would really enjoy modeling a protein around the idea of a pea plant (although I would not use a pea plant as the actual medium). Pea pods as beta strands, leaves as beta sheets, vines as alpha helices. I feel that this would tie science with art together very well.
Two of the traits studied by Mendel (stem length and wrinkled seed) have recently been traced to expressed proteins (the first is an enzyme involved in plant hormone manufacture, the second is an enzyme involved in starch manufacture). Those proteins have not yet been structurally characterized, so their 3D structures aren’t deposited in the PDB. On the other hand, the PDB does list 109 protein structures from Pisum sativum, the garden pea:
http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/results/results.do?qrid=B41168EC&tabtoshow=Current
Many of the 109 are repeat views of the same protein, such as the hugely complicated structure of the pea photosystem I involved in the light reaction of photosynthesis (see structure 2O01 in the PDB and note the many chlorophyll molecules it includes, the many alpha helices, and the surprisingly small number of beta strands, i.e. not many pea pods!). Another is structure 1QG0, a protein involved in the dark reaction of photosynthesis — its structure was solved by OSU’s very own Professor Karplus (when he was at Cornell).
The pea protein that I personally think looks the most like the garden pea is identified in the PDB as 2WMC. This is a mutant form of the eukaryotic initiation factor found in peas (involved in ribosomal translation). The famous mosaic virus attacks pea plants and uses the normal initiation factor in its manufacture of the viral proteins. However, pea plants that express only the mutant initiation factor (2WMC) are resistant to the mosaic virus. That’s a pretty cool story — a Mendelian trait that helps Mendel’s peas look good (here’s a pea plant with the virus http://www.science.oregonstate.edu/bpp/Plant_Clinic/images/pea_enationvirus.htm )