Also, I've been wondering about what my level of complexity should be in animating Ig gene conversion. Since my audience will be at the researcher level, (and possibly also aimed at upper year undergrads), I would like to be as molecularly 'accurate' as possible.
(David Goodsell. 2005. The Molecular Perspective: Rad51 and BRCA2. The Oncologist. 7: 555-556.) Showing Rad51 binding to 2 DNA molecules. One ssDNA (pink) exchanges partners with a strand of the yellow double helix, and inside the Rad51 enclosure, a triple DNA helix exists.
I really like the concept of protein-DNA interactions, and I think many visualizations of DNA miss out on a lot of the story. i.e. They show two lone strands of DNA that, of their own volition, bend and twist around, bind onto template strands, without any kind of chaperone, scaffolding, or conformation-changing proteins to effect those forces..
And yet mutants with knockouts for these proteins show serious handicaps (AID, compromised immune system), increased cancer susceptibility (Brca1, breast cancer), or outright mortality (Rad51). These examples are all involved in chicken Ig gene conversion, and also are implicated in human disease and DNA regulation..
In short, I would like to explore a more complex protein-DNA story of gene conversion; with proteins as the protagonists, and DNA as their construction site...
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