![]() ![]() Supported Formats The supported formats include DDBJ, ENA, GCG, GenBank, FASTA and plain text. The entire browser window (the result of a "select all") of a GenBank/ENA/DDBJ page can be pasted into the text box. If a plain text protein sequence is entered, a map will be displayed showing all possible restriction sites allowed by back-translation of the sequence. Try the Clean Up button to remove numbers and other extraneous characters (preserves FASTA format).Lanthipeptides are ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs) that display a wide variety of biological activities, from antimicrobial to antiallodynic. Lanthipeptides that display antimicrobial activity are called lantibiotics. The post-translational modification reactions of lanthipeptides include dehydration of Ser and Thr residues to dehydroalanine and dehydrobutyrine, a transformation that is carried out in three unique ways in different classes of lanthipeptides. In a cyclization process, Cys residues then attack the dehydrated residues to generate the lanthionine and methyllanthionine thioether cross-linked amino acids from which lanthipeptides derive their name. The resulting polycyclic peptides have constrained conformations that confer their biological activities. ![]() In 1989, as communism was beginning to crumble across Eastern Europe, just a few months before protesters started pecking away at the Berlin Wall, the Japanese game-making giant Nintendo reached across the world to unleash upon America its own version of freedom.Īfter installation of the characteristic thioether cross-links, tailoring enzymes introduce additional post-translational modifications that are unique to each lanthipeptide and that fine-tune their activities and/or stability. The new product was the Game Boy - a hand-held, battery-powered plastic slab that promised to set gamers loose, after all those decades of sweaty bondage, from the tyranny of rec rooms and pizza parlors and arcades. The unit came bundled with a single cartridge: Tetris, a simple but addictive puzzle game whose goal was to rotate falling blocks - over and over and over and over and over and over and over - in order to build the most efficient possible walls. You were both building walls and not building walls if you built them right, the walls disappeared, thereby ceasing to be walls.) This turned out to be a perfect symbiosis of game and platform. Tetris’s graphics were simple enough to work on the Game Boy’s small gray-scale screen its motion was slow enough not to blur its action was a repetitive, storyless puzzle that could be picked up, with no loss of potency, at any moment, in any situation. ![]() The pairing went on to sell more than 70 million copies, spreading the freedom of compulsive wall-building into every breakfast nook and bank line in the country. Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played. Monopoly, for instance, makes perfect sense as a product of the 1930s - it allowed anyone, in the middle of the Depression, to play at being a tycoon. Risk, released in the 1950s, is a stunningly literal expression of cold-war realpolitik. Twister is the translation, onto a game board, of the mid-1960s sexual revolution. ![]() Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect - in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 - and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves. In 2009, 25 years after the invention of Tetris, a nearly bankrupt Finnish company called Rovio hit upon a similarly perfect fusion of game and device: Angry Birds. The game involves launching peevish birds at green pigs hiding inside flimsy structures. ![]()
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