68. – Have you ever looked at the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I? – You saw only a beautiful queen in a white silk gown with a ruff. – But what if the portrait is not a work of art — but a molecular diagram?
– Her skirt is the B pentamer of cholera toxin. Her collar is the A1/A2 domain. – Her necklace encodes organic molecules. – Every string of pearls is a chain of hydrogen bonds. – Even the rose pinned to her collar — that is the active site of the enzyme.
– In the new series „The Wardrobe of the Genome,” we show that the clothing architecture of the aristocracy encodes proteins, molecule by molecule. – And when you begin to zoom in on the portrait — you discover the same hierarchy at every scale.