Bringing Cell Biology to Life


A stunningly beautiful animation shows examples of activity within living cells.



Yesterday I came across a video called The Inner Life of a Cell from the BioVisions program at Harvard University. This is an amazing piece of animation that shows details of the inner workings of living cells, down to the scale of proteins. There are two very different versions, each valuable in its own way.

One shows about three minutes of beautiful but unexplained video, with a fine musical background. I recommend starting with this delightful version. If you know anything about cell biology, you will recognize some things, but may be puzzled (or even mystified) by others. In any case, I think you'll find it astonishing.

If you'd like some explanation of what you're seeing, there is another version without music, but with voice-over and some text labels. (Choose one of the "Inner Life" images, based on your connection speed. The "super speed" version took some minutes to load over my DSL connection.) Some of the description is rather advanced, and was beyond me, but you are likely to gain insight from parts of it.

While this animation may be scientifically accurate in many ways, it is necessarily rather schematic in other ways, for the sake of making it comprehensible. Many of the structures are set apart from each other using color, though they are too small for visible-light color to be physically meaningful. The scenes show particular molecules interacting, but omit a sea of others that would obscure the interaction.

There is also little hint of the time scale. Some of the most striking scenes show examples of a kind of molecular motor, kinesin molecules, that move vesicles by "walking" along microtubules (as in the image above). I was curious about their actual pace, so I searched for additional information and learned that they evidently execute about 100 "steps" per second! Each step generally uses the energy from one ATP molecule, and advances just eight nanometers.

Posted: Sun - October 26, 2008 at 01:45 PM       by email

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