{"id":1607,"date":"2008-02-29T16:37:31","date_gmt":"2008-02-29T16:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2008\/02\/29\/ricen\/"},"modified":"2008-02-29T16:37:31","modified_gmt":"2008-02-29T16:37:31","slug":"ricen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/29\/ricen\/","title":{"rendered":"Ricin"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"i-4d5a930c6d550db0c61c05b71992ef75-ricin.jpg\"At this moment, there is a guy laid up in the hospital in Vegas with ricin poisoning. A stash of ricin has been found in his hotel room\/apartment. His dog is dead (not sure why but probably due to lack of water and food) and a couple of other pets are either dead or not doing well (details are blurry).Details, sketchy as they are, here. <\/a>So what is ricin?Ricin is an extract from castor beans (Ricinus communis<\/em>). The lethal dose is as little as 0.2 miligrams. That is an amount somewhat smaller than a house fly.Some creative uses of ricin include the following, cribbed from Wikipedia:<\/a><\/p>\n

On September 7, 1978 the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was shot in the leg in public on Waterloo Bridge in the middle of London by a man using a weapon built into an umbrella. The weapon embedded a small pellet in Markov’s leg which contained ricin. Markov died four days later.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ouch<\/p>\n

In 2003, a package and letter sealed in a “ricin-contaminated” envelope was intercepted in Greenville, South Carolina, at a United States Postal Service processing center.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Very suspicious<\/p>\n

In February 2008, A man who stayed in a Las Vegas hotel room where ricin was found was in critical condition at a hospital. The story is still developing as this page is being edited.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Holy crap, Wikipedia is SO<\/em> current!How does it work?<\/p>\n

Ricin is a potent cytotoxic protein derived from the higher plant Ricinus communis that inactivates eukaryotic ribosomes. … we have studied the mechanism of action of ricin A-chain on rat liver ribosomes in vitro. Our findings indicate that the toxin inactivates the ribosomes by modifying both or either of two nucleoside residues, G4323 and A4324, in 28 S rRNA. These nucleotides are located close to the alpha-sarcin cleavage site and become resistant to all ribonucleases tested.[source]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That is not a real current source, but you get the idea. I’ll leave it for the biochemical bloggers to explain this in more detail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At this moment, there is a guy laid up in the hospital in Vegas with ricin poisoning. A stash of ricin has been found in his hotel room\/apartment. His dog is dead (not sure why but probably due to lack of water and food) and a couple of other pets are either dead or not … Continue reading Ricin<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[103],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s5fhV1-ricen","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1607"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}