Longest Chemical Name: 64,060 letters

mycro writes "A new article on Wikipedia shows the longest chemical name, reaching 64,060 letters. Methionylalanylthreonyl...leucine is a chemical name for enaptin, a nuclear envelope protein found in human myocytes and synapses, which is made up of 8,797 amino acids. It is involved in the maintenance of nuclear organization and structural integrity, tethering the cell nucleus to the cytoskeleton by interacting with the nuclear envelope and with F-actin in the cytoplasm."

Easy Paradox

[poopdeville]

People are just going to call it "The chemical compound that cannot be named in less than 60,000 characters." Whoops.

Re:Easy Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

Or those who RTFA would call it enaptin.

Re:Easy Paradox

[poopdeville]

It was a joke. Get over yourselves.

Re:Easy Paradox

[dasunt]

I call it bloatware.

Re:Easy Paradox

[paz5]

As would those who RTFS(ynopsis)

Re:Easy Paradox

[vadim_t]

No, they'll call it M64058e, following the convention established by i18n and l10n.

Re:Easy Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer "That which must not be named".

Sincerely, He Who Must Not Be Named

With an article like that...

[Anonymous Coward]

...no wonder nobody has anything to say yet. We're all still trying to get our brains past the first sentence.

Spelling bee

[regcrusher]

I dare the contestants of the Scrips-Howard spelling bee to get that one. "May I hear that word in a sentence?" "Uh...... (nervous) no."

..... and?

[gl4ss]

not to crash on your party but so what?

saippuakauppias (translated: soap dealer,or soap merchant, anyways, a guy that sells soap you get the point) is the most commonly used finnish palindrom. AND that chemical name would be probably longer if written in finnish(glutamiini instead of glutamin).

OK, it's late and this story didn't make any sense from apart being a pure tidbit - what kind of other discussion can you spur from this anyways?

Re:..... and?

[joib]

saippuakauppias (translated: soap dealer,or soap merchant, anyways, a guy that sells soap you get the point) is the most commonly used finnish palindrom.


Not to mention that a variant of that word, "saippuakivikauppias", is the worlds longest palindrome.

I blame IUPAC nomenclature

[Dancin_Santa]

The problem with this kind of naming scheme is that no valuable information can be quickly gleaned from the name itself. Neither the function nor form of the amino acid can be determined or inferred easily without resorting to computer-aided decryption of the name itself.

Something easier to remember (not an acronym of this long-ass acronym) that clearly explained the form and function of the amino acid would be much more useful.

In programmer terms, this IUPAC nomenclature is like Hungarian notation, putting too much information about the data into the name without sufficiently ascribing useful information to it.

Re:I blame IUPAC nomenclature

[Dr. GeneMachine]

This is no IUPAC problem - this long name is simply the sequence. If you have a functional protein, you have other nomenclatures at hand, for example the IEC classification [qmul.ac.uk] for enzymes. Biochemists have developed several systems of nomenclature, which are actually useful (Overview here [qmul.ac.uk]. IUPAC has its place for small molecules organic chemists are concerned with.

By the way, if you want a longer and equally useless chemical name, you can always spell out the nucleotid sequence of a whole chromosome in full nomenclature.

Re:I blame IUPAC nomenclature

[Dr. GeneMachine]

There is no purpose, dear AC. Everyone would write Methionylalanylthreonyl...leucin as MAT...L in standard one letter code. There you have a represenation in which you can actually see patterns, that give you clues about function etc.

Re:I blame IUPAC nomenclature

[bill_mcgonigle]

How do you shorten the name without increasing the collision domain? As it is the name probably describes multiple possible isomers. Prions show us how important it is to get that straight (or properly folded as it were).

Anyway, IUPAC nomenclature wasn't meant to describe proteins - the amino acid sequence should be shorter and less wordy but that still doesn't represent specific isomers.

Still it's quite the supercalafragilisticexpialadocious endeavour to write it down (OK, so someone hacked a script to

Re:I blame IUPAC nomenclature

[Dr. GeneMachine]

Unfortunately the name - which is simply the sequence - does not give you information bout different conformers, at least not in a straightforward way. If you wrote out the sequence of the prion protein in that way, it would not reveal its "prionness". You'd have to do statistical analyses for that, and even they aren't that accurate.

Re:I blame IUPAC nomenclature

[jd]

This reminds me of the attempt to "standardize" element names by converting each digit of the atomic number into Latin. Needless to say, it never became popular, and most serious scientists quietly disposed of it.

Besides, the name can't even be used in Scrabble.

Re:I blame IUPAC nomenclature

[BillyBlaze]

I don't think anybody suggested that would be done for all elements, or permanently for any. It's just so there's a way to talk about the newly-discovered ones until people stop fighting over whom it should be named after.

Re:I blame IUPAC nomenclature

[zero_offset]

In programmer terms, this IUPAC nomenclature is like Hungarian notation, putting too much information about the data into the name without sufficiently ascribing useful information to it.

Hungarian notation is useful information in itself, by definition. You don't simply affix some notation, then go somewhere else to assign useful information to that notation. There are unquestionably situations and places where it is not useful, or even simply undesirable, and even casual browsing of the Win32 API will cl

Re:I blame IUPAC nomenclature

[Phillip2]

A very bad idea. Naming a gene after its function is a recipe for installbility. Every time your ideas about the genes function changes, you have to change the name, adding to the already complex synonym nightmare.

The idea for a name, to my mind, is that it should be semantics free. Hence the use of meaningless accession numbers (P05443) in addition to the (thin) semantic content of identifiers (OPSD_HUMAN).

IUPAC strings are not actually names at all, but representations of structure. While I have some do

oh please

[moosesocks]

it's like the linguistic equivilant to an irrational number. brilliant!

Spelling?

[Phleg]

If someone spelt it wrong, how would we know?

Re:Spelling?

[thegrassyknowl]

I say - I think I might change my Ph.D topic to study that chemmical. Write it in your thesis a few times and there is a two-volume manuscript that is full mostly of a few instances of one chemical name. I bet that's why the name is so long... whoever discovered it decided that he needed a space filler for his thesis...

Re:Spelling?

[thelenm]

It might also be useful to credit a second author (or at least mention him in the acknowledgments): Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfernschplenden-schlitter-crasscrenbon-fried-di g ger-dangle-dongle-dungle-burstein-von-knacker-thra sher-apple-banger-horowitz-ticolensic-grander-knot ty-spelltinkle-grandlich-grumblemeyer-spelterwasse r-kurstlich-himbleeisen-bahnwagen-gutenabend-bitte -ein-nürnburger-bratwurstle-gerspurten-mitz-weimac he-luber-hundsfut-gumberaber-shoenendanker-kalbsfl eisch-mittler-auc [wikiquote.org]

Re:Spelling?

[brian0918]

I used a spell-checker. Don't worry.

Re:Spelling?

[Enrico Pulatzo]

well, as long as the first and last letters are there [bisso.com] it doesn't matter what order the letters are in. May God help you if you introduce an extra "q" or "h" however...

Re:Spelling?

[Phleg]

Spelt is a word. Check the dictionary.

Do not change the name,

[mikeage]

No matter what, we should not change the name to make it shorter. Otherwise, purists will call it,
"The chemical formerly known as Methionylalanylthreonyl...leucine". adding 31 more characters...

Hmm...

[schmink182]

Occurences:
a - 5940
b - 0
c - 1946
d - 238
e - 3210
f - 0
g - 2738
h - 1192
i - 2666
j - 0
k - 0
l - 14645
m - 1938
n - 3195
o - 1457
p - 1398
q - 0
r - 2771
s - 3069
t - 3575
u - 3273
v - 430
w - 0
x - 0
y - 10379
z - 0

Nope...it's probably not random.

Re:Hmm...

[Farq Fenderson]

But it is highly redundant:

$ du -sh chem
68k chem
$ gzip chem
$ du -sh chem.gz
12k chem.gz

Re:Hmm...

[JohnFluxx]

Just to point out that a lot of that compression is merely from the fact that you are only using 26 out of the possible 2^8 combinations.

Re:Hmm...

[dillon_rinker]

You are correct, but "a lot" is not "most." Most of the compression comes from the redundancy. To be precise:

There are 26 characters, as you point out. On the other hand, as the grandparent poster points out, only 18 are used.

log2(18)=4.17 (to the largest hundredth)

So you only need 4.17 bits to represent 26 characters.

8 bits/4.7 bits = 1.9

So using a more compact bit-level representation of characters, you could achieve a compression ratio of 1:1.9. This would reduce the file from 68K to 36K.

The commen

Re:Hmm...

[JohnFluxx]

Heh, I was going to do the math myself, but then thought "nobody will care" and stopped. Glad to see someone else did it for me.

Re:Hmm...

[JohnFluxx]

I doubt there's a way to define what information density is. After all, you could compress it to just 1 bit with the appropriate algorithm

Re:Hmm...

[JohnFluxx]

yes, but like you say all compression is tailored to the data. After all the average compression for a random data is zero.

Re:Hmm...

[Fizzl]

It's encrypted!
See freq analysis at http://www.fizzl.net/projects/crypto/

The plaintext is simply:
wioglcnteaeante ... utemrcetemrcetemrceteeihulni

I think I also saw Cthulhu there somewhere...

Research papers...

[Oyume]

Wow, this will REALLY help masters and doctorate students who have to write research papers with a minimum page count...

Jds

Comment haiku

[AlpineR]

Methionylal-
anylthreonyl... oh just
call me enaptin.

Re:Comment haiku

[JPelorat]

Anti-distinctly minty?

What about titin?

[syntax]

Why doesn't Titin have the longest official chemical name? As a 27,000 amino acid protein, I think it has a bit of an edge.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cm d= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12187564&dopt=Abstrac t

Re:What about titin? Non-broken tinyurl link

[syntax]

Slash seems to still break long URLs for some reason. http://tinyurl.com/5avfq

Re:What about titin?

[brian0918]

Damn, this will be over 250,000 letters long. I'll get to work on it :)

Re:What about titin?

[brian0918]

Alright, titin exists now. The REAL longest word, at 189,819 letters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methionylthreonylthre onyl...isoleucine

Re:What about titin?

[brian0918]

fixed link: link [wikipedia.org]

Re:What about titin?

[william.gunn]

No, you still don't have it. Check out Dystrophin [nih.gov], as another posted has mentioned.

In related news...

[hoggoth]

The artist formerly known as <unpronounceable-mail-female-soapstone-symbol>, formerly known as Prince, has changed his name to the 64,060 symbol long name of a protein referred to as 'Methionylalanylthreonyl...leucine'.

His upcoming album will have a 10 page foldout with his name printed on it.

God?

[Deliveranc3]

As an atheist I must say this seems like a possible arguement for intelligent design I mean LOOK AT IT!

I guess I'd need to look into it's functionality but that doesn't seem like something that just SPRINGS into existence.

On the positive side all the sci-fi where they talk about advanced races with overly complicated DNA well they need to move forward right now...Like when we actually got to mars.

Re:God?

[zero_offset]

Your first two sentences are contradictory.

As an athiest, I assume you believe in evolution. The very word "evolution" implies that the subject did not "spring" into existence. Contrast this with, "Let there be light!" as a means of explaining away just about everything.

The protein formerly known as enaptin

[sydbarrett74]

Where's the funky Princely symbol?

I MADE THIS!

[brian0918]

We were talking on #wikipedia about the longest word, and User:Kim Bruning did a search on Swiss-Prot for the longest protein, and it was an 8797 amino acid chain. So, I pasted it into notepad, replaced the letters with words, did some modelling with SWISS-MODEL, and made an article on Wikipedia.

Re:I MADE THIS!

[william.gunn]

You shouldn't have searched SwissProt, you should have searched pubmed. I'm replying to a bunch of your posts, in the hope you'll see at least one and correct your wikipedia page entry to include Dystrophin [nih.gov].

Re:I MADE THIS!

[brian0918]

Yeah, I noticed. Thanks. Until I can find the sequence for dystrophin, I can convert it into a word. Can you find a link to the actual amino acid sequence?

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN

[brian0918]

Hey don't make fun of my heritage.

M64058y

[at2000]

Havn't we learnt from the history and hence name it "M64058y"?

M64058e

[at2000]

Havn't we learnt from the history and hence name it "M64058e"?

That's nothing.

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

The chemical name for my DNA sequence is so long that if you wrote it in 12 point characters it'd stretch all the way around the world. The only reason it's not in Wikipedia is that the web browser balked when I tried to type it in.

Yeah, and?

[SoCalEd]

News for Nerds? Check.

Stuff that Matters? Um... Well... Oh, nevermind...

Slow news day, methinks.

Worst Submission Ever

[Salis]

Whoever created the Wikipedia article is a moron. If they were going to expand out the IUPUC form for some protein (a molecule which has its own nomenclature btw) then they should have chosen Dystrophin.

The Dystrophin exon (coding sequence) is over 2.4 MILLION bases or 800,000 amino acids long.

Using the moron's system of naming proteins, Dystrophin's name would be ~3.5 MILLION characters long.

Wow and this made it past the Slashdot editors. Good job guys! Maybe it's because the editors have no clue about most science. Maybe they need to hire someone who does.

Re:Worst Submission Ever

[Enrico Pulatzo]

Poor humorless bastard.

May I suggest you edit your profile and remove the "It's Funny Laugh" section out of your homepage? I mean, humor is subjective and all, but smile and move on!

Re:Worst Submission Ever

[Salis]

Hey, I'm in a bad mood and the icon is a giant foot.

And it's not really that funny. I mean, if I told the joke to all of my engineer friends, there'd be crickets. And they're engineers. That bad.

Re:Worst Submission Ever

[gl4ss]

It's even less funnier than "Timo upotti uittopuomit".

spell it backwards, it's finnish. this 'joke' is just about as funny as linking to this stuff.

hell, even goatse is funnier even after all the reruns.

Re:Worst Submission Ever

[isorox]

I'm willing to forgive the editors on this one, when you compare it to the obvious trolls, astroturfs and non-storys that make it into other catagorys than "It's funny, laugh"

Re:Worst Submission Ever

[brian0918]

Yes, and until you write down the sequence for dystrophin, guess what, it won't be the longest name ever written down, bright eyes.

Re:Worst Submission Ever

[p3d0]

Whoever created the Wikipedia article is a moron.

...

Wow and this made it past the Slashdot editors. Good job guys! Maybe it's because the editors have no clue about most science. Maybe they need to hire someone who does.

Wow, lighten up, Chicken Little. Yes, the name is arbitrary. That's no reason to spew invective.

Re:Worst Submission Ever

[william.gunn]

AMEN!
I immediately thought of titin, at 20k AAs. I think you're right that the slashdot editors are a little weak on their biochemistry. You rarely see articles about drugs or genes on slashdot(they are covered well enough elsewhere) and I've had a quibble or two about the few I have seen. Oh well, I'm glad it was posted because that gives us a chance to educate people.

Re:Worst Submission Ever

[Jugalator]

Stop whining and ask to get hired by the ones you call morons already... ;-)

Re:Worst Submission Ever

[John Newman]

Whoever created the Wikipedia article is a moron. If they were going to expand out the IUPUC form for some protein (a molecule which has its own nomenclature btw) then they should have chosen Dystrophin.

The Dystrophin exon (coding sequence) is over 2.4 MILLION bases or 800,000 amino acids long.

Using the moron's system of naming proteins, Dystrophin's name would be ~3.5 MILLION characters long.

Wow and this made it past the Slashdot editors. Good job guys! Maybe it's because the editors have no clue about

Acronym.

[jfisherwa]

.. Or you can just call it mnotsosynasoclealicsamowensadokcliasdasdasopdocias ldsadlasodosaclasdolcoasldomceociasldklakcmsladicl loilielacecasdliclktalsdmaldsolmsanodcoieapoaelasa sdmomcasnesoelocleoclyiasiyi for short.

(Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.)

Did anyone else see that?

[whitetiger0990]

Yes it may have been vandalism and was corrected but this vandalized version [wikisource.org] just got me laughing.

"I think we forgot an "e" in there someplace..."

This little tidbit was the most interesting part of this whole thing.

I am serious here ...

[schotty]

Why is there really a need to make a name this frigging long? Does the need exist? I would have to say that this overcomplicates things quite a bit.

And people say computer acronyms are hard ... Guess that's why THEY get paid the big bucks ...

Re:I am serious here ...

[belg4mit]

Because that's a systematic name, it tells you what it actually is.

Re:I am serious here ...

[belg4mit]

I actually I take that back, while it tells you what it is, it's only a semi-systematic name. A Truly systematic name would; not use the names of amino acids, contain lots of numbers, be much longer and more difficult to understand.

Wow....

[Frodo Crockett]

Take that, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis!

At last

[jebiester]

A word over 18770 characters that fits the requirements for my Windows password. [microsoft.com] ;-)

Why is this news?

[Rie Beam]

Seriously, though - Why is this on the front page of Slashdot? It isn't news in the least (pages are created all the time on Wikipedia, and just because this one is related to Science doesn't make it news), and although it is slightly interesting, it's also inaccurate - "Methionylthreonylthreonyl...isoleucine [wikipedia.org]" is the longest, coming in at an obscene 189,819 letters, not including dashes, leaving "Methionylalanylthreonyl...leucine" behind at a pathetic 64,060 letters. I repeat - why is this news?

Re:Why is this news?

[walders]

...and it's only the longest (or 2nd...) name because someone actually wrote it down. It's a protein, made of amino acids, comprised of covalently-bound atoms. Big deal. The amino-acid sequence (usually represented by single letter or 3-letter abbreviations) is sufficient and meaningful.

There are stretches of DNA that are far bigger than that (e.g. chromosomes). But noone bothers writing down the chemical formula for any of them, because listing the sequence of bases is sufficient.

I agree with pre

Re:Why is this news?

[william.gunn]

"because listing the sequence of bases is sufficient." Listing the aminoacids is sufficient as well. They even have one letter codes for them.

2nd longest?

[SmilingBoy]

The full name for Methionylalanylthreonyl...leucine, the 2nd longest chemical name to be written down, containing 64,060 letters (excluding any dashes), is:

[...]

So what is the longest?

Re:2nd longest?

[brian0918]

I just wrote out a longer version, so this one is no longer the longest. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titin [wikipedia.org]

Problem with wikipedia

[tod_miller]

I go on there, I have no idea (without arduous checking of history) if the content hasn't been slashdot trolled.

It says the '2nd' longest written down.

Also, who knows if the original is correct, and I guess with diffs the 1 letter chanegs can be found.

Anyone posted the largest known prime to wiki yet?

Trolls putting a 2 onthe end will cause some giggles.

ok that is me.,

Common Name: Cymru-onium

[fuzzybunny]

I'm glad the Welsh are finally getting into the whole chemical thing.

Well, it sounds like some village in Wales [luoac.co.uk]...

Methionylalanylthreonyl...leucine...

[PapaBoojum]

Would be a kickin' name for a rock band.

Or not.

.WAV file?

[halliburton]

Mr. Tammet, could you please upload a WAV file?

Personally...

[http101]

I think the rules for Spelling Bees are funny. You're allowed to stop, restart the spelling of the word, including the misspellings, but are only told the word is incorrectly spelled when you complete the word and reiterate the entire word.

Now, can you imagine this one being on the Spelling Bee list?

rotflmfao!

I'm E-Mailing that to a few people

[Spazztastic]

I'm copy and pasting that article and sending it to a few people I know (My dad who has a Ph.D, a few professors I know, and a few of my dad's co-workers), I'm sure they'll get a kick out of trying to pronounce that.

Re:I'm E-Mailing that to a few people

[brian0918]

I just wrote out a longer version, so this one is no longer the longest. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titin [wikipedia.org]

Re:I'm E-Mailing that to a few people

[william.gunn]

They're just going to tell you you're wrong. Dystrophin is bigger.

link to the full name

[drunken dash]

See all 64,060 bytes in their full glory here [wikisource.org].

I think I'll name my first born after this chemical name.

I'd like to see what this molecule looks like...

[Mikito]

...on second thought, maybe not.

It doesn't sound like something that I would expect to show up at Folding@Home [stanford.edu] anytime soon.

Good lord...

[XO]

Not ONE person read this, did they?
It's all a big farkin' joke.

The full name has "allyourbasearebelongtous" embedded in it. sheesh.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Good lord...

[p3d0]

Dude, that just means Wikipedia got trolled. Are you aware of what Wikipedia is? Check again.

Early Loof Lipra?

[ehud42]

From the last line of the compound's name:

araginylglycylprolylprolylprolylleucineallyourbase arebelongtous

I call foul! I think this one should have been kept under wraps for another few days...

oh.

[rgf71]

I was wondering why I couldn't name a txt file that.

Spelling bee

[Mr. BS]

"Sorry Timmy....It's spelled m-e-t-h-I-o-n...."

Methionylalanylthreonyl...leucine....

[CaptainCarrot]

...of Ulm!

T-Shirt?

[crotherm]

Where's the Think Geek T-Shirt?

shorter DNA sequence than name

[Linuxathome]

at about 27000 bp (8797x3), I'd much rather email someone the DNA sequence than the name.

Sure, but...

[Locke2005]

Hey, the commonly used abreviation is only 1001 letters!

Overheard in the science lab that worked on this..

[Cervantes]

Bob: Hey, Bill, where's that stack of floppy disks?
Bill: Over in that cabinet there... why?
Bob: Oh, I was just writing up a two-paragraph blurb about our little chemical here, and I mentioned it by full name a few times...