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Monday
Jul232012

Back to the drawing board

Here's an update to a project I posted about on May 29th. I had just come up with a new design for this website graphic about ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation. Well, two things happened. One was that we decided to scrap autophagy and focus on the selectivity of the proteasome pathway for a particular topology of ubiquitination. To convey selectivity, we needed many more ubiquitinated target proteins, which were literally depicted as targets. The other thing was that I needed to restrict the palette to black, white, gray, and red. So when I incorporated those changes, what I ended up with was so hypnotic it would have made Tim Burton nauseous. After quickly scrapping that, I instead decided to use the already gray background of the website as a chalkboard. This is what I came up with. In addition to showing selectivity, it's meant to demonstrate the steps to degradation, namely binding of the ubiquitins, de-ubiquitination, unfolding of the target protein, and finally proteolysis. By the way, this was done completely with the Wacom pen tablet, which I now love!