DNA repair enzyme MutS from E. coli

The machinery that copies DNA makes an error approximately every 10 million bases. That may not seem like much if you are a bacterium that only has 5 million bases in its genome, but if you replicate once per hour, then on average half of your descendants have a mutation, and this number rapidly approaches 100% as you near the end of the day.

It stands to reason, then, that E coli needs something more than just proofreading polymerases to keep its DNA from mutating, and that is where the mismatch repair protein MutS fits in.

MutS clamps on to the mismatched base pairing and recruits other proteins that perform the repair.

Read more here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MutS-1

Instructions

I got this model from PDB structure 3zlj.

Printed using KISSlicer, 0.15 layer height and 0.5mm extrusion width, 15% infill and with the support flow rate decreased to 75% by an external script.