Poem: Faded Genes

I wrote this poem 4 years ago for a biology class sophomore year (biocore). There was a poetry and protein contest to come up with a poem that used only letters that were 1-letter symbols for amino acids. With twenty amino acids, the letters we could not use were BJOUXZ (O was the rate-limiting factor). The TAs even put this into software to calculate the amount of alpha-helix and other peptide parameters. Rereading this poem now, I don't think it's very good at all, but it amuses me.

Faded Genes

It all starts with a TATA,
Even if tata in English means farewell.
Here, in the letters that direct cells,
We start at the signal indicating Met.
I met a triplet yesterday –
He was a CCC, that cipher waving at
The tRNA with the weird acid –
Cyclic, yet where is the amine end?
I sigh with relief, finally, as I see
A calm street – GCC, GGA,
Glycine, alanine, spiraling in
Alpha helices,
A strange Van der Waals dance
‘Til the sterics in Trp mess the helices–
What Thanksgiving feast makes this peptide fat?
Here, I see a place waving at a splicing
Peptide and its assistant snRNPs,
Snerps, I like calling them.
Again, I see a cysteine,
With linkages with its pair,
Making a tertiary crinkle.
Where shall this peptide travel?
Wrinkling a pea, perhaps,
In a geneticist’s garden?
Instead, a plasmid in a flask
With reverse transcriptase and cDNA?
Perhaps in the dinner, as a split pea entrée,
Entering the digestive tract in a pretty girl
Named Maria
With gastric acid that will add an H in aspartic acid
And attack with trypsin,
Tearing my lysine apart.
And the reader might ask
The identity in this verse,
A speaker packed with facts and data –
I can’t see and predict everything, can I?
I am merely an rRNA segment
23S, in fact,
With my five-prime cap
And my walking stick,
Wandering and translating,
Wearing faded genes.