unforum

[Mikeyj]

I've not had a decent sit down with this one yet, but some half finished thoughts that might kick someone else off:

1. twixwolfs link above to the ligand database is really handy, you can also get extra information about each one by searching PDB (protein databank) I think it had some extra data on each of the ligands. I was wondering whether I could get some binary out of the charges on each molecule or that there was some sort of link with the molecular weight (there's everything from single ions to great big beasty molecules in the lists), but have not been able to get anything useful yet. (Plus I need t'internet in my house aaaaagh!)

2. I thought that I started to see a pattern that linked ligands to blood clotting pathways (and then Gel Together would make a nice bit of sense too) but I don't know enough about human biology (I abandoned boring old eukaryotes before university) to work it out.

3. The arrangement of the ligand abbreviations is like a diagrammatic form of an electrophoresis gel (some examples here. You have lanes, in our case three, and bands in each of the lanes, sometimes with gaps between them. I'm not sure whether it's significant or just to make it pretty and fit in with "Gel" again. Getting one gap at a time, except at the end, if you read down each lane gives you word spacing, and it seems to me that with each ligand representing a letter you could have a sensible length of sentence?

With respect to the phylogenetics, it's the animals that are bugging me and that's what lead you down that route isn't it AndyAndyO?...do the ligands form a question (in a Broadside kind of way) and the animals relate to the answer? Phylogenetically I don't think there is enough DNA sequence information available for each of the organisms shown in order to construct a phylogenetic tree. And what would we do with it if we got one?

off for a ponder

[Shaph]

Another link... possibly helpful?

[Mima]

Tried

[AndyAndyO]

[Mima]

[AndyAndyO]

Updated wrong answers list.

[Rand0m]

I'm determined not to let this one fall to guesswork without at least some sort of fight to solve it properly.

I'm working on the principle that this isn't a hardcore scientific puzzle where we have to identify how a specific compound or substance behaves using gel electrophoresis - it seems too abstract for that (compared with the scientific silvers in season one) and I can't believe it's a coincidence that we have plausible word breaks and substances grouped together by similar weights.

So that leaves us trying to somehow convert these compounds into letters.

*scratches head*

Edit: Just tried

[Mikeyj]

[Rand0m]

[Mikeyj]

Thanks Rand0m (anyone else finding three forums hard work?), they seem to have got contacts at the EBI...I can't compete , but I'll upload my spreadsheet anyway here in case people want to shuffle things around. Currently they're in order L-R reading across the card. The clustering of molecular weights in each of the words is curious. Could that mean a different alphabet for each word?

[Zapateria]

It's a long shot but:

[Shaph]

[Zapateria]

Warning: guesswork beyond this point

[Albedo]

To add to Zapateria's idea above:

[Shaph]

I think I've given up on molecule building (can't get anything to work out to anything) so I decided to try a bit of analysis into turning the ligand abbreviations into code. I'm pretty sure I hit a dead end but I figured I'd share it anyways: