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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."
People are just going to call it "The chemical compound that cannot be named in less than 60,000 characters." Whoops.
After all, I am strangely colored.
...no wonder nobody has anything to say yet. We're all still trying to get our brains past the first sentence.
I dare the contestants of the Scrips-Howard spelling bee to get that one. "May I hear that word in a sentence?" "Uh...... (nervous) no."
The problem with this kind of naming scheme is that no valuable information can be quickly gleaned from the name itself. Neither the function nor form of the amino acid can be determined or inferred easily without resorting to computer-aided decryption of the name itself.
Something easier to remember (not an acronym of this long-ass acronym) that clearly explained the form and function of the amino acid would be much more useful.
In programmer terms, this IUPAC nomenclature is like Hungarian notation, putting too much information about the data into the name without sufficiently ascribing useful information to it.
it's like the linguistic equivilant to an irrational number. brilliant!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
If someone spelt it wrong, how would we know?
No comment.
Occurences:
a - 5940
b - 0
c - 1946
d - 238
e - 3210
f - 0
g - 2738
h - 1192
i - 2666
j - 0
k - 0
l - 14645
m - 1938
n - 3195
o - 1457
p - 1398
q - 0
r - 2771
s - 3069
t - 3575
u - 3273
v - 430
w - 0
x - 0
y - 10379
z - 0
Nope...it's probably not random.
Wow, this will REALLY help masters and doctorate students who have to write research papers with a minimum page count...
Jds
Methionylal-
anylthreonyl... oh just
call me enaptin.
Why doesn't Titin have the longest official chemical name? As a 27,000 amino acid protein, I think it has a bit of an edge.
m d= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12187564&dopt=Abstrac t
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?c
The artist formerly known as , formerly known as Prince, has changed his name to the 64,060 symbol long name of a protein referred to as 'Methionylalanylthreonyl...leucine'.
His upcoming album will have a 10 page foldout with his name printed on it.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
As an atheist I must say this seems like a possible arguement for intelligent design I mean LOOK AT IT!
I guess I'd need to look into it's functionality but that doesn't seem like something that just SPRINGS into existence.
On the positive side all the sci-fi where they talk about advanced races with overly complicated DNA well they need to move forward right now...Like when we actually got to mars.
News for Nerds? Check.
Stuff that Matters? Um... Well... Oh, nevermind...
Slow news day, methinks.Insert witty comment *here*. I'm fresh out of wit...
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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Yes it may have been vandalism and was corrected but this vandalized version just got me laughing.
"I think we forgot an "e" in there someplace..."
This little tidbit was the most interesting part of this whole thing.
You have been warned.
Take that, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis!
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
Would be a kickin' name for a rock band.
Or not.