[HN Gopher] The secret lives of cells - as never seen before
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The secret lives of cells - as never seen before
Author : panabee
Score : 19 points
Date : 2021-11-05 19:38 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| 323 wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromolecular_crowding
| richardatlarge wrote:
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| SHAKEDECADE wrote:
| I get flashbacks to the movie adaptation of Flatland (the
| newest one was the most colorful). The movies though don't hold
| a line segment to the book.
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