It's not nearly as good quality as on the main site, so watch it there if you can. Some of it appears magical, that's cause it is. The animation is all based off of real molecular data, so the shapes and movements of the molecules is as accurate as they can make it. The trippiest looking guy is the Dr. Seuss-style motor protein walking along the myosin (big tube) highway, pulling along the vacuole (storage sack), through the cell. The smaller tubes are for structure
In real life though, the cell is a much more crowded place, no free space. The big cable things zipping and unzipping can do that because they are saturated in fluid that has all the pieces right there.
Also, the little zip lines are mRNA (info from DNA that can be sent into the main part of the cell), the little globs clamping on are Ribosomes and they spit out little proteins ordered from the info on the RNA.
The whole cell is supposed to be a white blood cell traveling on the inside of an artery or vessel. It crawls along with the sticky interactions of it's membrane proteins.
It starts out in the vessel, looks at the surface proteins, the upper side of the membrane, lower side of the membrane, skeletal structure of the cell, highway system of the cell (with centrioles in the background as the hub), nucleus and ER with mRNA going to protein, vacuole formation and golgi apparatus, vacuole merging with the outer cell membrane and dumping proteins and contents outside the cell, proteins making contact with the surface, and then the white blood cell flattens and leaves the vessel.
4 comments:
ooo, that was cool. I think I could watch it a few times and stay mesmerized.
I started to watch the video and didn't feel too good... I guess my pregnant self doesn't handle any kind of health video very well right now.
By the way, you need to post pics of your daughter because I want to be shocked by how big she's gotten since we last saw you guys. Say hi and congrats to Emily for getting into nursing school! Yay!
That was awesome I wish they had videos like that when I was in highschool. I think I would have understood a lot more of what my sci teacher was talking about.
What a wonderful piece of video clip! It is mind boggling to think about so many things going on in one little cell! And multiply that how many times throughout our body every single minute...it's kind of like trying to think about space and stars and planets and galaxies, etc....my mind can't do it for long without feeling crazy!
It all reminds me that we and the world we live on are no accident or something that just happened!
Love you, Christian! You have been blessed with a wonderful mind to study such things.
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