Living cells are very fast and crowded places (2012)
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Re: Living cells are very fast and crowded places (2012)
#2I am suddenly very uncomfortable, imagining myself as a roiling blob of goo.
Re: Living cells are very fast and crowded places (2012)
#3I highly recommend the book "The Machinery of Life" by David S. Goodsell. It isn't too long, the text is interesting with out getting too bogged down in the details (there simply would be too much to cover in detail), but the highlight is he a professor of molecular biology, he is an excellent illustrator, and the book is packed with detailed illustrations that alone make the book worth it. $18 on amazon. (get the 2nd edition, not the 1st edition)
Just do a google search for images on the book title and author name to see what is inside.
Re: Living cells are very fast and crowded places (2012)
#4I am suddenly very uncomfortable, imagining myself as a roiling blob of goo.
Anything can be described both fancifully or dreadfully. One can say we are blobs of goo, biological automotons living on a speck of dirt in a googlplex of a cosmos. Or one can say that we are the result of billions of years of evolution on top of natural laws that first produced symmetries, conserved quantities, and higher level order like atoms and then stars - that then birthed heavier elements that eventually became us. So when you look up at the hard mineral made stars, remember that goo is just a mindset, for those very stars are effectively the embryonic stage of life itself..
You may enjoy Alan Watt's take on this: https://youtu.be/SOKwgP1Hte8
Re: Living cells are very fast and crowded places (2012)
#5I highly recommend the book "The Machinery of Life" by David S. Goodsell. It isn't too long, the text is interesting with out getting too bogged down in the details (there simply would be too much to cover in detail), but the highlight is he a professor of molecular biology, he is an excellent illustrator, and the book is packed with detailed illustrations that alone make the book worth it. $18 on amazon. (get the 2n…
Sounds great! Along these lines, I've really enjoyed some of the iBiology[0] videos, especially the ones about molecular machinery. It's the 3blue1brown[1] of molecular biology.
Re: Living cells are very fast and crowded places (2012)
#6I spoke to a colleague who had done some work in his PhD in the physical chemistry of cells. Concepts like 'liquid' do not translate well at the intra-cellular level. 'holes' or 'channels' in a membrane, again are mostly about metaphors rather than mechanistic statements of completeness. he said for some things, an Escher infinite-space filling grid was as good a metaphor, for the cellular structure that the various organelles negotiate. (this btw, is asinine, and would deserve a "physical chemist here: this is bullshit" response)
Re: Living cells are very fast and crowded places (2012)
#7I spoke to a colleague who had done some work in his PhD in the physical chemistry of cells. Concepts like 'liquid' do not translate well at the intra-cellular level. 'holes' or 'channels' in a membrane, again are mostly about metaphors rather than mechanistic statements of completeness. he said for some things, an Escher infinite-space filling grid was as good a metaphor, for the cellular structure that the various…
To clarify: your colleague's comment is asinine?
Re: Living cells are very fast and crowded places (2012)
#8I wish I understood where all this stuff came from. When we talk about evolution we talk about random gene mutations and natural selection, but it doesn’t seem like the machinery of the cell itself is described by DNA. How do cells themselves and all their internal machinery evolve?
If all you had was a genome, could you really use it to engineer the cell required for it to go inside of?
Re: Living cells are very fast and crowded places (2012)
#9[deleted]
Re: Living cells are very fast and crowded places (2012)
#10I am suddenly very uncomfortable, imagining myself as a roiling blob of goo.
Don't be silly; you're trillions of blobs of goo.