The molecules for this month come from the paper by Rose, Palcic, and Evans on structural factors determining blood type. Included are interactive molecule files for the three determinant molecules and the two donors. While these molecules are of interest at a variety of levels, one could easily ask beginning students to look for familiar structural features within the molecules, such as phosphate groups and carbohydrate moieties, as well as asking them to describe the overall structures in terms of the expected geometries of particular portions of each molecule. In addition to introducing some interesting and important biochemistry, such exercises would also introduce students to structural pattern recognition, a tool that chemists exploit constantly.

Also included is the structure file for the galactosyltransferase GTB. This structure was previously reported by the authors (Patenaude, S. I.; Seto, N. O. L.; Borisova, S. N.; Szpacenko, A.; Marcus, S. L.; Palcic, M. M.; Evans, S. V. Nat. Struct. Biol. 2002, 9, 685–690) and is presented without the water molecules that were determined in the crystal structure. More advanced students would find it instructive to reproduce this structure using a tool such as the Swiss-Pdb Viewer (accessed Oct 2005).

In addition to static images, two fully manipulable versions (Jmol, MDL Chime) of these molecules appear below. (The Jmol versions may take a few extra seconds to load, based on the speed of your Internet connection.)