QZ qz thoughts
a blog from Eli the Bearded

A Protein Alphabet


Mark Howarth, having looked at a lot of protien visualizations, realized that there is enough diversity to easily create an alphabet of protein shapes.

This is all the more impressive since the proteins are all three dimensional shapes, and only look like letters from certain angles.

I used the 3-D visualizer at the protein database he links to create my own images of the Q (3SZV, Pseudomonas aeruginosa OccK3) and Z (4BTA, Peptide(pro-pro-gly)3 bound complex of N- terminal domain and peptide substrate binding domain of prolyl-4 hydroxylase (residues 1-244) type I) letters.

QZ protein images

And then made a QZ logo for the blog out of them. First new logo in a while, and currently the largest one in the collection (by file size). Very, very, few of more than one thousand QZ images in the logo collection are color, which makes having them small much easier.