Monday, April 22, 2013

Sulfur-containing Amino Acids

I was recently working on a submission for a pass-along story [1][2] I've been writing with some of my friends for a few years now, which we call Blood Faith.[3] It concerns a secret world of vampires (no relation to the creatures found in the Twilight books and movies [4]). It is written in epistolary fashion, much like the famous vampire novel Dracula or C. S. Lewis' novel The Screwtape Letters. The first several letters are pedagogic, explaining many aspects of the vampires' secret society, while the later letters transition into a narrative about several vampires who discover additional secrets that the rank-and-file vampires are unaware of. Even though we're far into the narrative at this point, I decided to go back and write another pedagogic letter about the effects of garlic on vampires. While researching various chemical compounds found in garlic, I discovered that the chemical structures for several of these compounds weren't available on Wikimedia Commons. So I made them myself.