Aisle 7No. 114 of 460
Splashery
Protein
280,000 small parts. Assembled in your browser.
Empty. Now look down.

Swipe across the pack to tear it open.
Press and hold. It pulls itself together.
Let go to drop it.
It stays in its pack here. The Playground has the rest.
Atoms · Built from a recipe
Protein
Proteins are the tiny machines of living things.
Play with it in the Playground
How to play
Tap to pull it apart. Hands-on: pull a helix out of the fold; let go and it folds back.
Toy facts
- Item
- No. 114 of 460
- Shelf
- Aisle 7, Atoms
- Kind
- Built from a recipe
- Small parts
- 280,000
- Your own
- Your own protein
- Sound
- Yes
- Hands-on
- Yes
- Batteries
- None
- Assembly
- It does that itself
- Licenses
- CC0
- Price
- $0.00
Small parts are the splats in its usual build on a computer. A phone may draw fewer.
Its controls
| Control | Kind | Range | Start |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pull it apart | Tap | ||
| Pull apart | Button | ||
| Protein | List | 5 choices | Ubiquitin (1UBQ) |
| Color | List | 3 choices | Rainbow, start to end |
About it
Proteins are the tiny machines of living things. Each is a long chain of building blocks called amino acids that folds up into its own shape: coils called helices, flat strands and loops. Hemoglobin carries oxygen in the blood, insulin helps control sugar, and a jellyfish protein, GFP, glows green.
These are real shapes from the Protein Data Bank, a free library of well over 200,000 structures that scientists share. Tap it to pull it apart into its pieces, and they come back by themselves; tap again while it is apart and they come back at once. In GFP the glowing part lights up while it is open. You can open any PDB or mmCIF file from the library in the Splash tab.
Details
- Splats
- Opens at 200,000 at Mid Detail, 60,000 at Low, and up to 400,000 at Max
- Your own files
- .pdb, .ent, .cif, .mmcif, .txt
Sources and credits
| Work | By | License |
|---|---|---|
| RCSB Protein Data Bank entries 1UBQ, 4INS, 1EMA and 4HHB | the wwPDB and the structures' authors | CC0 1.0 |
| Velcro (protein-velcro.mp3) | paulocorona | CC0 1.0 |



