Animating the living cell
October 5th, 2008 Posted in Science
I find biochemistry intriguing. The most complicated reactions take place in this messy fluid inside living cells, carefully balancing the laws of entropy and energy to maintain order. Now I came across the channel ndsuvirtualcell in YouTube. This is some kind of educational project, that has produced really nice animations of the most important biochemical processes: photosynthesis, (with a detailed look at Photosystem II and synthesis of ATP), DNA transcription, mRNA translation and a few others. I don’t really know how these things are discovered, but it looks cool. Do not be deceived by the clean look of these animations though, we can simulate the way some of the smaller proteins actually behave, and it is a whole lot more messy.