One of the most fascinating parts to me was DNA transcription. The engineering is quite precise.
Found the video I was referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY
One of the most fascinating parts to me was DNA transcription. The engineering is quite precise.
Found the video I was referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY
For illustration, consider the classic animation of a walking kinesin towing a vesicle. One could jiggle-ify it. But that won't convey that during every step, the vesicle has done a "balloon in a hurricane" exploration of every possible position it can reach while remaining tethered. Won't clarify that the very very misleading "I'm just a peaceful barge" vibe is entirely animation fantasy. Secondary content could have been added to defuse this negative educational impact, but the choice was made to optimize for, and I'm quoting, "pretty".
Jiggle-ification takes perhaps the biggest educational downside of these animations, and makes it even more misleading.
One thing that these animations always remind me of is that speeds at that level are tied to size. We're use to a world where birds and cars are faster than pollen and insects (mostly), but the fidgety twerking of all those big proteins is due to collisions with higher-velocity, invisibly small molecules like water (Brownian motion). When was the last time a pollen grain made you flinch? Everything is kinetic/EM energy exchange; everything is in the gray area between Newtonian and quantum physics. (Shout out to Einstein, but also Boltzmann through Dirac.)
I didn't get the "miles of DNA" reference. A single strand of DNA is approx 3 meter in length when uncoiled. Now I'm thinking how many strands may be replicated at a time.