BWKAZ: ... regarding how they figure out what the beads are, that's readily apparent from the DNA strands that created the proteins in the first place. You said you did stuff with biology before...

Yup, worked (for free) for a several years in a biochemistry lab helping a girlfriend get her Ph.D. in genetics. I can still feel the cold from having to work for hours with the French press down in the walk-in deep freezer in the basement.

...but for other people reading this, there are 4 different "components" to DNA...

Yup, and I also remember the hours where I read off those sequences as she double-checked them on films and such. Lovely working in a lab where everyone wears a radiation counter on their lab coat's collars ... NOT!

...and a sequence of three of these makes up one amino acid. So there are something like 64 different amino acids (actually there are less, but I don't remember why right now).

*Scott fires up the Bat signal to get the attention of Scoofy12.*

If you take, oh, 110 amino acids or so and string them all together, you get a protein (actually a fairly short one AFAIK in nature, but long for a project like this -- the current CASP target is 182, but the previous proteins we were doing were 50-some, 80-some, generally less than 100). Obviously not all proteins are the same length though

What's the longest known protein? Howard, we will ever tackle it? If not, just how long of a protein will we end up tackling? And, of course, if we're not going to eventually tackle the longest one, why not? Personally, I think it would be cool tackling the longest known protein for no other reason that just doing it.

The Human Genome Project found the DNA sequence of every strand in the human body. So knowing that, we can predict the sequence of amino acids in every protein that our bodies could ever produce.

*whispers to Bwkaz so Jodie doesn't pull out anymore hair* But how do we know this? So we know our entire DNA, but how do we know "every" protein that it will create?

But at that point, all we know is the sequence...

How did we know such-and-such as a protein sequence? Is there some markers on DNA that say something along the lines of: "From here to here is a protein." ?

Does that help any?

Contrary to what you might think by the questions above, it did.