{"id":187184,"date":"2024-04-11T14:28:52","date_gmt":"2024-04-11T19:28:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/discovery-of-the-first-fractal-molecule-in-nature"},"modified":"2024-04-11T14:28:52","modified_gmt":"2024-04-11T19:28:52","slug":"discovery-of-the-first-fractal-molecule-in-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/discovery-of-the-first-fractal-molecule-in-nature","title":{"rendered":"Discovery of the first fractal molecule in nature"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/discovery-of-the-first-fractal-molecule-in-nature2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>An international team of researchers led by groups from the Max Planck Institute in Marburg and Phillips University in Marburg has now discovered the first regular molecular fractal in nature. They discovered a microbial enzyme\u2014citrate synthase from a cyanobacterium\u2014that spontaneously assembles into a regular fractal pattern known as the Sierpi\u0144ski triangle. This is an infinitely repeating series of triangles made up of smaller triangles.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe stumbled on this structure completely by accident and almost couldn\u2019t believe what we saw when we first took images of it using an electron microscope,\u201d says first author Franziska Sendker.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe protein makes these beautiful triangles and as the fractal grows, we see these larger and larger triangular voids in the middle of them, which is totally unlike any <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/protein+assembly\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">protein assembly<\/a> we\u2019ve ever seen before,\u201d she continues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An international team of researchers led by groups from the Max Planck Institute in Marburg and Phillips University in Marburg has now discovered the first regular molecular fractal in nature. They discovered a microbial enzyme\u2014citrate synthase from a cyanobacterium\u2014that spontaneously assembles into a regular fractal pattern known as the Sierpi\u0144ski triangle. This is an infinitely [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}