Get Yourself a Bioreactor

Here’s some trivia you can recite next time (i.e. in five minutes) you want to sound really cool:

Q. How many eukaryotic membrane proteins have been crystallized from bacteria?


A. Zero.

After those in your audience have recovered from that staggering statistic, they will undoubtedly be so amazed by your ostensibly infinite knowledge that they will be ready to listen to anything you say. And that’s the best time to treat them to another morsel:

Q. How many high-resolution structures of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) have been solved?


A. One: rhodopsin.

Depending on your delivery, your listeners will be
- A) stunned speechless (again)
- B) enraged
- C) contacting their Congressmen within the hour
And regardless of your delivery, they will want more. So you will give them more:

Q. Where does rhodopsin come off being so structurally solvable?


A. Because the rod cells in your eye make like a ton of it so it’s really easy to purify.

Then one of your newly won acolytes is bound to complain:

C. But that’s not fair to the other GPCRs: they’re all expressed in such low concentrations.

To which you will reply:

R. Exactly, it’s not fair, Little One, but there is hope.

And then you will read to them the graphic novel you prepared for this occasion, where you show how Li Zhang from Novasite Pharmaceuticals developed a method to make rod cells generate any GPCR in just as high a concentration as rhodopsin–GPCR bioreactors!

(At this point, I recommended you give them some time to take it all in. They’ll sleep well knowing that somewhere there’s a mouse with eyes jam-packed with human GPCRs.)