Last November, I bought Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts (5th edition). I’m a few chapters in, and so far it’s an excellent textbook, I recommend it.
But there’s something that has been intriguing me for months: Once every few pages, seemingly at random, there are groups of 4 red letters inside pointy brackets. At first, I thought it was probably formatting meta-data, some kind of printing accident. But the second time the red letter popped up in a weird place, I noticed that the letters were all DNA letters (T,A,G,C).
Could this be a puzzle? Is this some kind of clever biological joke by the authors?
If it is, what do these code for? Some well-known protein?
It’s a mystery so far.
Update: Unless this is a well-known joke among biologists (it’s a common textbook, after all) and someone tells me about it in the comments or via email, I’ll probably compile a sequence of nucleotide letters long enough for it to be unique and then Google it. I had my “duh” moment and realized there’s no need to go through the whole 1000-page book and compile all of red letters…
April 7, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Insufficient data. If you have all of them or a sufficient number of them, in the proper order, it might be possible to come up with something.
April 7, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Jordan,
You’re right, of course.
Maybe someday I’ll go through the 1000-pages and compile the whole thing (if my curiosity doesn’t fade). But I was kind of hoping that by posting about it, someone who already knows about this would be able to help. It’s a fairly common textbook, so maybe the puzzle/joke is well-known among biologists..?
Or maybe another strategy would be to compile a sequence of nucleotides that is long enough to be unique, and then just Google it and see what comes up. That’s probably the smart way to do it.
August 10, 2008 at 9:55 pm
You’d be better off compiling the nucleotides and then going to NCBI and running a BLASTn search. Google isn’t going to do you any good.