Little things, big things and problems of unknown size…
I have been working on my Enzyme project – and am getting quite excited about it. However, I’m also aware that I don’t want it to take over totally so I leave room for other ideas and experimentation with all the bronze casting techniques. With a view to this, I want to limit the size of the enzyme sculpture – but this is a little bit more complicated as I can’t go too small on the figures or they won’t be castable. I think the limit is 3mm for the bronze to flow properly.
So – I did some research and calculations. A carbon-carbon bond is between 120 – 154 picometers (pm). Picometers are what they use to measure atomic dimensions.
1 picometer is 1/1,000,000,000,000 m (pretty small!)
Most small molecules are measured in Ångströms (Å) which is 100 times bigger than a picometer, for e.g. Water is 3Å.
Proteins and Enzymes are measured in nanometers (nm), which is ten times bigger than an Ångström. So:
1Å = 100pm
1nm = 10Å = 1000pm
A typical globular protein is about 4nm. So, if I made my carbon-carbon bond about 12 cm long (roughly the scale used in my diamond inspired sculpture), then my total sculpture would be 4 meters – which would be quite an undertaking! That is assuming I can find a suitable enzyme that is only 4nm – some might be even bigger than this.
So it I want to reduce the scale of the total sculpture, I could try reducing the scale of my carbon-carbon bond, aka my figure-figure distance. The man in the middle of my tetrahedron has arms & legs of 3.5cm from the centre of the figure. This is probably the limit of how small I can go, as the wrists on this are about 2 x 3mm, and the tips of the fingers are 1mm. I will probably have to wait till I’m at the foundry to find out if I can get away with this. Even so, this would give me a 7cm carbon-carbon bond length, thus a 4nm protein would be about a 2m sculpture – still quite big! Hmm, worrying…
