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Longest Chemical Name: 64,060 letters
mycro writes "A new article on Wikipedia shows the longest chemical name, reaching 64,060 letters. Methionylalanylthreonyl...leucine is a chemical name for enaptin, a nuclear envelope protein found in human myocytes and synapses, which is made up of 8,797 amino acids. It is involved in the maintenance of nuclear organization and structural integrity, tethering the cell nucleus to the cytoskeleton by interacting with the nuclear envelope and with F-actin in the cytoplasm."
Or those who RTFA would call it enaptin.
But it is highly redundant:
$ du -sh chem
68k chem
$ gzip chem
$ du -sh chem.gz
12k chem.gz
[ approaching AI ]
Unfortunately the name - which is simply the sequence - does not give you information bout different conformers, at least not in a straightforward way. If you wrote out the sequence of the prion protein in that way, it would not reveal its "prionness". You'd have to do statistical analyses for that, and even they aren't that accurate.
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Whoever created the Wikipedia article is a moron. If they were going to expand out the IUPUC form for some protein (a molecule which has its own nomenclature btw) then they should have chosen Dystrophin.
The Dystrophin exon (coding sequence) is over 2.4 MILLION bases or 800,000 amino acids long.
Using the moron's system of naming proteins, Dystrophin's name would be ~3.5 MILLION characters long.
Wow and this made it past the Slashdot editors. Good job guys! Maybe it's because the editors have no clue about most science. Maybe they need to hire someone who does.
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