Friday 31 May 2019

A note on the Linux PyMOL C01 atom oddity

This weird bug has been haunting me for ages. The PyMOL 1.8 (not 2 in Win or Mac) and Linux PyMOL 2 builder creates residues with a Cα called C01 as opposed to CA. If any operation is done to these (e.g. Rosetta Relax), they will be discarded during the reading of the file. That is, they will not be fixed and worse if Rosetta Remodel is used, it will assume that the residue never existed, because Remodel does not understand PDB numbering annoyingly. Simply substituting all 'C01' to 'CA' fixes the problem.

Thursday 16 May 2019

The secondary metabolism of pineberry strawberries

For an upcoming open-day we will extract DNA from strawberries. For this I made a slide that explains how DNA mutations lead to protein variants, than in turn lead to different phenotypes (redness in the strawberry's case). In doing this, I got fascinated by a strawberry cultivar called "Pineberry". But not because it is unpigmented, but because the reviews online say it is bland, which means that a rather early enzyme is missing resulting in a unpigmented phenotype and a bland phenotype.