Polyketides

I believe my previous post made some claim about marking calendars or some such thing that is now, in retrospect, quite ridiculous. Too bad. I thought it made more sense to extend my hiatus than to come back for another single post and vanish yet again. My vacation has been over for a while, but I've actually had a lot going on. Most importantly, I will be going to a new school in January (the University of Washington) and studying (among other things) inorganic chemistry. It's exciting. But because of this, I've considered shutting down operations here. I've been practically nonexistent on this blog recently, and if I'm too busy with school to ever post again, what's the point of trying to maintain this blog? Well, I'm recommitting myself to this endeavor. I know it seemed like I was doing that in my previous post. Fine. You've got me. I messed up. Just give me one more chance. Maybe. I have plans for this blog and I am almost sure that I know how I want to proceed, but I'll save it for the next post. If my plan works out, next year, despite me going back to school, will be this blog's busiest year so far by, well, a lot. There will be many posts. How many? At least fifty-two. No really, that's my plan.

But we'll save that for my next post, which will not be next year, but sometime soon. I'll try to have at least two more posts this year after the one you're reading now. So bear with me—until my next post, at least. I'm not quite ready for it. But it will be soon. Later this week, even. For now, I'd like to talk about a different subject entirely.

I did get to do some cool, science-related things on my vacation. You know, the one that ended in October that I was supposedly going to come back from and write a bunch of posts here right after that. Yeah, that one. The museums alone gave me a ton of material I could use here (but won't, for now anyway). There was also one, completely unexpected moment that is the inspiration for this post. After a bunch of crap we're not going to talk about right now, I arrived in the city of Bonn on, let's see, the October 3rd. The hostel I had booked was a weird one that didn't have its reception open until 5:00 PM. So I found it from the train station and walked down the street to get some lunch. I had a döner for lunch. I want a döner for lunch every day. They are so good. Almost too good. It's uncanny. Anyway, I was really thirsty, so I hunted down a store where I bought some ice cream and what I thought was orange juice but turned out to be more like orange soda. That sucked, because I hate carbonated beverages, but I was so thirsty that I drank it anyway. When I walked down to the hostel, there were some people talking. One of them was an American who mentioned doing biological research. I asked her about it. We ended up talking for a while, a lot of it about science.

It just so happened that a German biochemist who was there for some reason overheard our conversation. He talked a little about his own research on polyketides. I'd heard of them before, but that was about it. For the past two months, I've occasionally been amused at the realization that I "went all the way to Europe" to learn something. Of course, I knew I would learn things there and actively attempted to do so. But somehow, the realization that I learned some individual thing I could, hypothetically, have learned just as well here, but didn't learn it until I was there is amusing. I was recently made the comment that I had to go all the way to Austria to learn that grated horseradish is awesome. Anyway, I suppose that's how learning things always is. Even when we set out to learn things, we don't know what exactly it is we are going to learn.

From what I recall, he described work on a polyketide produced by bacteria or a series of homologous polyketides produced by bacteria, but the bacteria lived in completely different hosts: one in a beetle, one in a sponge, and one in some other thing I forget. Horizontal gene transfer for the win. Anyway, one thing he emphasized was that polyketides display tremendous variability. I'll spare you pictures because I was recently lambasting my organic chemistry textbook (the one I've been using a lot for this blog) for trying to scare students away with a picture of a big biological molecule. The important thing is that this variability, the incomprehensible number of forms molecules can potentially take is, well, the whole story of biochemistry. Structure determines properties. And those properties, if they're some of the right ones anyway, are what make life possible in the first place. Almost makes me want to switch to majoring in biochemistry...