There is an experience called Nanoscape [1][2] on the Steam game store that was produced in June by an Australian university research group that basically places you at the center inside a working cell modeled off high resolution electron microscopy with the most rigorous attention to scientific detail you can imagine. I am not a biologist, but getting a perspective from inside a live full 3D model of the various cellular interactions between Proteins, Receptors and the cell's Plasma Membrane is truly awe inspiring. There is a scientific paper that goes into all the details regarding folding and lipids and medical Maya software etc [3]- but I just think its an amazing way to appreciate the miracle of a thousand complexities that we are.
Anyone know where I can watch these videos suggested in the article? I didn't see them linked, but I could have missed them.
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For a few weeks in 2017, Wanda Kukulski found herself binge-watching an unusual kind of film: videos of the insides of cells. They were made using a technique called cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) that allows researchers to view the proteins in cells at high resolution. In these videos, she could see all kinds of striking things, such as the inner workings of cells and the compartments inside them, in unprecedented detail. “I was so overwhelmed by the beauty and the complexity that in the evenings I would just watch them like I would watch a documentary,” recalls Kukulski, a biochemist at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
After drilling down a few links, I found this digital book, which seems to include some videos. Maybe not the same ones she's talking about, but it's a start.
A funny thing: some drugs which work in vitro don't work in actual cells because actual cells are much more crowded than liquid in a beaker.
This also makes it harder to simulate on computer, since you have a ton more interactions to evaluate.
Also, many proteins require this crowd pressure to keep them in the proper functional shape.
Looking at the images reminds me of when I started fixing cars. The more I learned about the nitty gritty, the more I wondered how it ever held together and worked. It was a worry.
Cars are very different from cells. With a car, effectively nothing lacks a function, and the functions are obvious and can be explained in a causal way.
With cells, it's more like "10 billions things all happen at once in a way that works continuously" but it's hard to identify "cause", and especially hard to say "the purpose of this thing is to X", becuase it wasn't designed, but rather, evolved as part of a much larger system.
Readit News
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1654050/Nanoscape/
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1634740/Nanoscape_VR/
[3] https://elifesciences.org/articles/64047
> For a few weeks in 2017, Wanda Kukulski found herself binge-watching an unusual kind of film: videos of the insides of cells. They were made using a technique called cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) that allows researchers to view the proteins in cells at high resolution. In these videos, she could see all kinds of striking things, such as the inner workings of cells and the compartments inside them, in unprecedented detail. “I was so overwhelmed by the beauty and the complexity that in the evenings I would just watch them like I would watch a documentary,” recalls Kukulski, a biochemist at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
https://cellstructureatlas.org/
You could also try asking her
https://www.ibmm.unibe.ch/about_us/personen/group_kukulski/p...
Also, many proteins require this crowd pressure to keep them in the proper functional shape.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromolecular_crowding
https://elifesciences.org/articles/64047
With cells, it's more like "10 billions things all happen at once in a way that works continuously" but it's hard to identify "cause", and especially hard to say "the purpose of this thing is to X", becuase it wasn't designed, but rather, evolved as part of a much larger system.