Siliconera Stash: Zelda meets Biochemistry

While cleaning up my place I found my old biochemistry notes from my graduate course in signal transduction. Most of my fellow students drew abstract circles and squares to chronicle pathways. Me? I scribbled images of Zelda for the lecture on p53. Why did I opt for Link? Well it’s more interesting than circles and it makes sense with the topic. Science lesson here: p53, a tumor suppressor protein coined as the “guardian of the genome”. When it stabilizes it forms a tetramer (read: four p53 units bind together). When I heard this I thought of Link because he is a guardian (of Hyrule) and four Links can join up to fight together as seen in the Four Swords Adventures. Throughout the entire lecture I kept pulling in as many Zelda references as I could to formulate a story of p53 as my personal study sheet. Of course the notes are crude drawings (hey this was during a lecture!), but this is a sheet in my scrapbook of science to video game analogies.

So this is our hero, Link as p53. I pointed out that amino acid #15 on p53 (Ser-15) as the sword because being phosphorylated at that amino acid (read: modified with a phosphate group) is its defense against being broken down.

This is Link fighting MDM2 (represented as some kind of skeleton enemy), which is an E3 ubiquitin ligase that binds to p53 and targets it to be destroyed. Usually, the body breaks down any p53 because it is a signal that promotes cellular death (apoptosis). However, p53 is critically important when it comes to cancerous cells. When cells suffer UV damage or other signals p53 begins to emerge and if enough of it can stabilize the cell will be locked in G1 arrest, which means the cancerous cell will not grow. Obviously, this is a good thing and this was one of the focal points in my research.

To get p53 to stabilize you need it to tetramerize or form, as I liked to call it at the bane of my professor, “the invincible sword formation”. Before you can get to that point you need to modify p53 by adding an acetyl group to it. In this frame I drew out the King of Red Lions as a transport protein, which brings Link to a magical fairy otherwise known as p300 to perform the modification.

Watch out Link! The HDAC monster can "eat" (remove) your aceylated group similar to how those monsters in Zelda can eat your shield. If that happens you can't move into the invincible sword formation.  

Alright! The Invincible sword formation made, the cell in question dies and the body is saved from a potentially dangerous cancer cell.

This is a short annotation of my notes. If you want to see the whole page of Zelda stuff it’s here, but beware I don’t really explain what’s going on in plain English in them!