Wow! That’s beautiful. It’s this kind of thing that gets molecular biological physicists, like, totally high. Transcription , translation, and even kinesin moving around…we want to know how does this all come from Cl/Q Mechanics and Stat Mech? This little flick would be a great recruiting tool to get physics students interested in ‘alive and squishy state physics’.

Wow! Incredible! I’m not sure what I was looking at most of the time, but I believe the last sequence was showing a lymphocyte leaving a blood vessel through a flap into surrounding tissue.

Brad, I haven’t found one. PZ mentioned the video a couple of weeks ago, but for some reason I didn’t click on it then.

Great video-tron-ics Sean. Beautiful!

Particles in molecular biology dance with such seemingly effortless and melodious grace (note background music) creating spectacular designs in nature, bar exceptions when they are subject to extreme temperatures or forces, or other disturbances (mutations, cancers)

Particles and events in particle physics appear so much more faster and violent (heavy rock music).
Simply different Energy Scales and tempo, Time(?) Scales

Hi! This movie is fantastic!

I also think we are seeing a lymphocyte rolling along inside a blood vessel. We first see the exterior of the cell and then we zoom in to see the proteins in the membrane that are mediating the rolling, by contacting other proteins in the surface of the substrate. We *then* go inside the cell and first have a tour of the various cellular components – mostly the elements of the cytoskeleton and proteins being moved around in the membrane on lipid rafts. We then, in just a beautiful sequence, see the assembly and disassembly of actin and then microtubules before watching a motor protein (kinesin, I would say) staggering along a microtubule bearing its enormous cargo (a vesicle). In a further extended sequence we watch mRNA being processed into protein. It is ejected from the nucleus, processed and translated by ribosomes into the endoplasmic reticulum, the protein is transported to the Golgi apparatus, where it is further processed and then finally ejected into the cytosol where it carried (lipid raft again?) to the membrane where its function will be to mediate the rolling of the lymphocyte. Thus, we come back full circle.

If you enjoyed that, do a web or PubMed search for “cryoelectron tomography” or “Wolfgang Baumeister”, one of its main practitioners. This is a revolutionary imaging technique that allows 3D visualisation of large protein complexes such as ribosomes and the cytoskeleton in situ in cells.

This is a beautiful piece of work, and accurate in many dimensions — the animators worked closely with Harvard faculty. I’d like to see more of this work, but I’d also like to see a version that makes clear which aspects are utterly false (and why the animators were forced to do it this way).

The main cheat is in the motion trajectories. What looks like action-at-a-distance is, in most instances, a consequence of this cheat. The animations shows smooth motions at the molecular scale that are in reality random walks by twisting, tumbling objects. Brownian motion and thermal fluctuations rule dynamics in the biological world of soft molecular structures moving in water. (By contrast, stiff, anchored structures could indeed move smoothly while merely vibrating.)

To give a sense of the magnitudes, the rotational relaxation time for an ordinary, mid-size protein is less than a microsecond: that is, it will typically rotate through a large angle in that time. In a time of the same order, it will typically travel a large fraction of its diameter. Many of the scenes portray protein mechanisms on a millisecond time-scale, however, so the smooth motions shown represent what are actually random walks following paths perhaps 100 times as long. If shown realistically, the molecular parts would thrash, rattle, and wander, sometimes blundering away to nowhere, but sometimes passing close enough to a target location to respond to short-range forces that align and bind them.

However, this realism would obscure the functional behaviors, making it hard to see the net result of all the jiggling. The actual animation instead obscures the fundamental physical nature of the processes, producing a false impression of mysterious vital forces at work. I’d like to see a version that shows a few mechanisms both ways, giving an explanation of their relationship and the reason for the cheat in the rest of the scenes.

(Also note that the among the objects shown, the ratio of actual size to screen size varies by a thousand or more, and the time scaling varies by a similar factor. Making this clear would be a great help.)

I’ve always had a bit of trouble reconciling the the astounding differences between two halves of planet Earth: the terrestrial and the submarine.

Now I have to think that just below the skin, we’re
every bit as strange as the sea.

Does anyone have a copy of the full version or know where I can find it?

Beautiful in every way. Does anyone know where this music came from?