Cyberslug t-shirt designs

Last year I started a “tradition” of designing a T-shirt for one of my classes.
Last year, it was for the Banana Slug Genomics class:

This was the 2010 design. Slug reproduction does involve them curling around each other, but in a planar spiral, not in a helix.

Although I taught the Banana Slug Genomics course again this year, I had few students in it, and I did not want to repeat last year’s shirt. So I designed a shirt for my other class, in which I was teaching about computational protein design. The protein image is an SH3 barrel (PDB id 1jo8A), which we had used as an example in class. It turned out that there were two other courses also doing protein work this quarter: an undergraduate course in protein engineering and the lab part of an undergraduate course in molecular biomechanics. My students did the same lab as the undergrads (but a day earlier). The lab consisted of transfecting E. coli with a plasmid, growing the cells, expressing the protein, lysing the cells, purifying the protein on a cobalt column using the HIS tag, and using SUMO protease to cleave off the HIS and SUMO tag.

We had hoped to be able to get genes synthesized for proteins of our own design, but the 10-week quarter was too short—we did not have any computational plausible designs until about 8 weeks into the quarter.

I’m hoping that enough of the undergrads will like the t-shirt design to amortize the setup charges for the two silk screens needed for the design:

This is the design for this year's t-shirt. I'm taking orders (from people affiliated with the Jack Baskin School of Engineering, since JBSoE has the rights to the cyberslug—for UCSC people the affiliation can be pretty loose) until Monday 6 June 2011.