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."

Comments

Spelling bee

[regcrusher]

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."

Re:Easy Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

Or those who RTFA would call it enaptin.

I blame IUPAC nomenclature

[Dancin_Santa]

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.

Re:I blame IUPAC nomenclature

[Dr. GeneMachine]

This is no IUPAC problem - this long name is simply the sequence. If you have a functional protein, you have other nomenclatures at hand, for example the IEC classification for enzymes. Biochemists have developed several systems of nomenclature, which are actually useful (Overview here. IUPAC has its place for small molecules organic chemists are concerned with.

By the way, if you want a longer and equally useless chemical name, you can always spell out the nucleotid sequence of a whole chromosome in full nomenclature.

Re:I blame IUPAC nomenclature

[Dr. GeneMachine]

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.

Hmm...

[schmink182]

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.

Re:Spelling?

[thegrassyknowl]

I say - I think I might change my Ph.D topic to study that chemmical. Write it in your thesis a few times and there is a two-volume manuscript that is full mostly of a few instances of one chemical name. I bet that's why the name is so long... whoever discovered it decided that he needed a space filler for his thesis...

Comment haiku

[AlpineR]

Methionylal-
anylthreonyl... oh just
call me enaptin.

In related news...

[hoggoth]

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.

Worst Submission Ever

[Salis]

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.