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Scanning tunnelling microscopy has been employed to visualize the structure of pig gastric mucin. Typically the expected protein backbone with a carbohydrate brush was observed, but with unexpectedly long carbohydrate chains (100 sugars as compared to 20). A small percentage of the mucin molecules displayed smooth heavily glycosylated regions, joined by naked protein backbone. These structures are consistent with the linear model for mucin sub-unit structure and the swollen random coil and linear random coil models for tertiary organization.
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Roberts et al. (1995) studied this question.
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