ShmoopTube

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Here’s your Shmoop du jour brought to you by John Dalton, a pioneer in the field of

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tiny atomic masses, who probably weighed approximately 49 octillion daltons.

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That’s, uh… 49 with 27 zeroes.

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Here’s a passage about a technique used to separate proteins by weight.

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The band marked C weighs closest to… what?

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And here are the potential answers…

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Sounds like we’re being asked to read the figure and determine the weights of the proteins

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shown—especially one in particular, right here: C.

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The key running up the left edge of the chart gives the weight of the proteins in--

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“kilodaltons,” if you’re fancy that's kDa. A Dalton is a very, very, very, very, very,

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very tiny unit of mass measurement named after John Dalton.

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We’re talking atomic-level, phenomenally tiny masses.

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But that’s the nature of the beast when we’re dealing with something as tiny as proteins.

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Anyhow, here we have protein C, and by following along to the key…

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…we can see that protein C weighs about 90 kilodaltons.

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So C’s our answer.

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A far cry from Dalton’s daltons, indeed.

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