moosemaster
5th May 2022, 12:30
Not long signed up, this seems like a good place to float a pet project of mine and see what comes back... Hopefully it's better received here than on reddit!
www.dna.place (http://www.dna.place)
My friend Mark Curtis stumbled across an interesting quirk of DNA:
After many attempts, he found he couldn't make sense of the two and three-dimensional representations he found in textbooks. They seemed to contradict one another. Frustration finally forced him back to what he refers to as "geometrical first principles", and in the manner of Renaissance perspectival artists such as Paolo Uccello, he began by making careful scale drawings of DNA.
DNA has ten base pairs to each turn of the helix, so, using these centuries-old methods, Curtis began with a decagon-a 10-sided figure. He then placed a pentagon for each base around it. The pentagon is the only regular shape that can fit round a decagon in this way without leaving any space. And according to Curtis, this figure of 10 pentagons oriented about a decagon is the only geometrical configuration that enables one to create a helix with the known dimensions of DNA. Add some thickness to each of the pentagons, and the 10 pentagons telescope out to form a helix. To build a structurally sound double helix, Curtis reasoned that he would need not just one pentagon, but two joined together. With this insight he was finally able to produce the drawings and paintings that he had originally planned.
This kind of reasoning may seem obscure by modern standards. But for Curtis, it established that a double helix of 10 turns had to be made of twinned pentagons. At this point in his work, he was still thinking in terms of the traditional Watson and Crick structure. But he faced a contradiction: in the standard Watson and Crick chemistry, the base pairs join through hexagonal regions in their structures. Then came Curtis's moment of truth: "I sat down on the sofa one night and I thought, hang on a second, the molecular structures of the bases also have pentagons in them. And here was I, with two pentagons, building a consistent helix that conformed to the dimensions of the DNA double helix." By connecting the bases differently, Curtis found that he could naturally form pairs of pentagons in each base pair. "It was placed in my lap. I wasn't trying to prove anybody wrong. I wasn't even thinking then that they've got it wrong. I was just playing, like artists play."
48860
www.dna.place (http://www.dna.place)
My friend Mark Curtis stumbled across an interesting quirk of DNA:
After many attempts, he found he couldn't make sense of the two and three-dimensional representations he found in textbooks. They seemed to contradict one another. Frustration finally forced him back to what he refers to as "geometrical first principles", and in the manner of Renaissance perspectival artists such as Paolo Uccello, he began by making careful scale drawings of DNA.
DNA has ten base pairs to each turn of the helix, so, using these centuries-old methods, Curtis began with a decagon-a 10-sided figure. He then placed a pentagon for each base around it. The pentagon is the only regular shape that can fit round a decagon in this way without leaving any space. And according to Curtis, this figure of 10 pentagons oriented about a decagon is the only geometrical configuration that enables one to create a helix with the known dimensions of DNA. Add some thickness to each of the pentagons, and the 10 pentagons telescope out to form a helix. To build a structurally sound double helix, Curtis reasoned that he would need not just one pentagon, but two joined together. With this insight he was finally able to produce the drawings and paintings that he had originally planned.
This kind of reasoning may seem obscure by modern standards. But for Curtis, it established that a double helix of 10 turns had to be made of twinned pentagons. At this point in his work, he was still thinking in terms of the traditional Watson and Crick structure. But he faced a contradiction: in the standard Watson and Crick chemistry, the base pairs join through hexagonal regions in their structures. Then came Curtis's moment of truth: "I sat down on the sofa one night and I thought, hang on a second, the molecular structures of the bases also have pentagons in them. And here was I, with two pentagons, building a consistent helix that conformed to the dimensions of the DNA double helix." By connecting the bases differently, Curtis found that he could naturally form pairs of pentagons in each base pair. "It was placed in my lap. I wasn't trying to prove anybody wrong. I wasn't even thinking then that they've got it wrong. I was just playing, like artists play."
48860