Each year, thousands of people take part in Inktober – a worldwide drawing challenge that encourages artists to hone their skills and create one work of art every day during the month of October. Last year, in celebration of 50 years of the Protein Data Bank archive, Irina Bezsonova decided to use the (more than) 180,000-strong database as a source for her prompts.
With some help from the Twitter community, Bezsonova – a structural biologist from the University of Connecticut – selected one protein each day that aligned with the official Inktober prompt – words like “crystal,” “knot,” and “sour.” A personal favorite (seen below) is the “loop” prompt, which gave rise to the NMR spectroscopy structure of the outer membrane enzyme PagP being represented with some knitting needles.
Overall, there are 31 drawings now available to download for free, each with the corresponding prompt, PDB structure, and a little information about the idea behind the sketch in question.
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