Do proteins have free will? And other cartoons…

Finally a new batch. This time the themes are whether proteins have free will and a taste-test by ribosomes…

Feel free to use and repost – just give credit to the artist and provide a link to this website!

More cartoons appear in the monthly MDC newsletter Insights, so be sure to visit the website and check out some of our more “serious” content there!

2954_001

2955_001

2956_001

And now for the ribosomes:

2952_001

2953_001

And once again, to kill the joke by explaining it:

Ribosomes build proteins by reading a three-letter code in RNA molecules (called a codon) and matching it to one of 20 amino acid building blocks. The nucleic acids “GAA” spell the code for glutamic acid, which is responsible for the taste of seaweed and is the source of monosodium glutamate.

Published by

russhodge

I am a science writer at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, author of fiction and popular science books, an artist, and a professional musician who performs on the viola da gamba and Medieval and Renaissance stringed instruments. I edit manuscripts of all types and teach the full range of scientific communication skills. I am doing theoretical work in this subject - see for example https://goodsciencewriting.wordpress.com/2018/03/11/ghosts-models-and-meaning-in-science/

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.