Hallowe'en-3: THE BOARDWALK CAPER

Needless to say, Mary Lou and Cheryl declined the notion of returning to their room once the guys had been let into their new room. By sun-up the next morning, it had been a worrisome and sleepless night as these six microbiologists from the Kollege of Knowledge shuddered with each set of passing footsteps in the hall outside the hotel room. They had discovered that Wilbie had totally forgotten about surrupticiously stashing the money in Dr. Spangler's room, and still carried it with him. But they soon figured that the money was the least of their worries: on the other hand, the two guns were! Six heart attacks almost commenced when - "Bang, bang, bang!" came from the direction of their door. Were they dead?

"DEEs EEz Nettie. I wanna talk ta ya guyz." They let Prof. Nettie in, but it took a long time for their hearts to stop racing. Oblivious to the fact that the dawn's colors were fading from the sky, the Columbia University professor wanted to discuss a research problem she had. She had run one of her "sequencing gels" and gotten these autoradiographic tracks:

The problem was that when this fragment of DNA was used as a template for making mRNA to be used in a Nirenberg System (ATP + GTP + all the amino acids + ribosomes + all the tRNA's + cytoplasmic enzymes) only a very small tetrapeptide was formed - something that looked like the precursor to glutathione, which is omega-glutamyl-cystinyl-glycine. Nettie jabbered on and on, but she noticed that these supposedly brilliant kids just didn't seem to be paying attention. She was about to leave in disgust, when Dr. Bengston asked: "Do you think we could walk with you back to your hotel?"

Nettie agreed, and while she got her notes together, Bengston clued his team in on the plan: "We've got to get all this stuff to the police station. If we take the back street, it'll take us right to the station." Out of Nettie's sight, Cheryl grabbed Goldie's picnic basket with the FBI gun, Jason retrieved the other pistol in the baggie from beneath the liner in the wastebasket, and Mary Lou and Wilbie divided the cash between her shoulder bag and his pockets in his baggy overalls.

They got out of the hotel without being spotted, and soon found themselves trudging along a back street, which, although dirty, was busy with two-way early morning rush-hour traffic. Bengston tried very hard to keep up a coherent conversation with Nettie, but lost it all when he was the first to see their real goal - "There it is, just a block to go." Confused, Nettie contested: "Wha'ja mean? Gotta two mo' blocks ta go."

Any counter-response was immediately cut off when a limo silently slipped up to the curb next to them. The door swung open and the "Suit" stepped out with a big gun hoisting up his new overcoat. "Get in - all of ya. NOW!" Mary Lou, who had had her hand in her bag to ward of pick-pockets, clenched a handful of the bills and threw them up into the air. "I've had enough of you guys, take your money." And she threw another handful up into the air, while her friends stood in mortal shock, while Nettie, who was actually on sabbatical for a year from frugal Scotland, wondered aloud: "If I hadn't seen it wit mine own eyes: deese 'Mer'can kids sure do haf money ta trow around!"

The money was caught in the breeze, and began to join the other litter swirling around in the street. Quickly spied by passing drivers as to what this litter was, the cars screeched to a stop, clogging the street. People were running all over the place racing after wafting bills. The "Suit" became disoriented and started making vile threats about not being able to escape in the car because of the jammed up traffic. Suddenly Cheryl sought to save the day by pointing the FBI revolver straight at the Suit. Momentarily subdued, the barrel of the big gun lowered under the overcoat. Then, thinking that this fine lass was only bluffing, the barrel began to rise again.

"No you don't!" Said a Hawaiian shirt stepping out of nowhere. The other Hawaiian shirt reached for Cheryl's pistol and she instinctively squeezed the trigger - but nothing happened - the trigger wouldn't move. The Shirt instantaneously wrestled the pistol in a quick professional manner from her grasp. "See, you've got to have a special electronic ring on your shooting hand to make this gun work. Just a precaution against someone else shooting me with my own gun - like you, Miss."

Within minutes the throngs of bystanders were joined by several cars from the Federal Marshall's officeŠŠ

1. List the ways that Mary Lou and her group used to escape the Hawaiian shirts and the "Suit". Consider what you learned about how pathogens foil our immune defenses.

2. What is the sequence of the tetrapeptide that Nettie's group was able to assemble in their Nirenberg System?

3. From the data in these past two quizzes, what can be said about the direction of reading the DNA strand?

4. And: help Nettie out - her fragment of ssDNA had the capacity for coding a polypeptide how many amino acids long? And why didn't it? Why only 4 amino acids long?