The secret lives of cells – as never seen before | Hacker News Reader

The secret lives of cells – as never seen before

nature.com

113 pointspanabee16 comments

There is an experience called Nanoscape [1][2] on the Steam game store that was produced in June by an Australian university research group that basically places you at the center inside a working cell modeled off high resolution electron microscopy with the most rigorous attention to scientific detail you can imagine. I am not a biologist, but getting a perspective from inside a live full 3D model of the various cellular interactions between Proteins, Receptors and the cell's Plasma Membrane is truly awe inspiring. There is a scientific paper that goes into all the details regarding folding and lipids and medical Maya software etc [3]- but I just think its an amazing way to appreciate the miracle of a thousand complexities that we are.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1654050/Nanoscape/

[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1634740/Nanoscape_VR/

[3] https://elifesciences.org/articles/64047

Thank you, this is amazing and totally went under my radar

And it appears to be FREE!

Anyone know where I can watch these videos suggested in the article? I didn't see them linked, but I could have missed them.

> For a few weeks in 2017, Wanda Kukulski found herself binge-watching an unusual kind of film: videos of the insides of cells. They were made using a technique called cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) that allows researchers to view the proteins in cells at high resolution. In these videos, she could see all kinds of striking things, such as the inner workings of cells and the compartments inside them, in unprecedented detail. “I was so overwhelmed by the beauty and the complexity that in the evenings I would just watch them like I would watch a documentary,” recalls Kukulski, a biochemist at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

After drilling down a few links, I found this digital book, which seems to include some videos. Maybe not the same ones she's talking about, but it's a start.

https://cellstructureatlas.org/

You could also try asking her

https://www.ibmm.unibe.ch/about_us/personen/group_kukulski/p...

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

Interesting - quite like post industrial revolution human workers, then.

https://elifesciences.org/articles/64047

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.

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.

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.

I didn’t see anybody suggesting cars and cells were alike.

the person I replied to said they looked at a picture and were reminded of cars "how could they possibly work"?

This video shows how to use a Cryo ET machine: https://youtu.be/L-65mpdKLzQ

I am just curious about how big this community of "tomographers" is given the costs and equipment etc? Is it like a few hundred people?

Is that only a few images? Where are the rest?

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