Animated Proteins Enzymes and You. (Beware .Gifs)

a reply to: Devino

i left out "and a dash of magic"

originally posted by: dashen
a reply to: Devino

i left out "and a dash of magic"

LOL
That was exactly what I was thinking. Magic or miracle yet I hesitate to use those words.

I never seen those, thanks. I felt tiny from macroscopic thinking and now I feel great.

EACH BREATHING MOMENT IS A

For those curious about the workings of that "walking" protein, Kinesin: www.youtube.com...



The first time I saw a computer simulation of it on TV I thought it was a microorganism.

a reply to: wildespace

Hi! Thanks again for the info.

a reply to: wildespace

If you're the motor protein up front, be prepared to do the heavy pulling.

That's one conclusion from a Rice University-led study of the mechanisms that drive kinesins, motor proteins that carry cargo inside cells. The study shows it takes a lot of counterforce to slow down a determined kinesin. Nor does the protein get much help from colleagues that bring up the rear.

...

Through computer simulations, the researchers provide the first molecular-level details of how kinesins respond to external forces while confirming earlier experiments by co-author Michael Diehl that showed teams of kinesins work best only when they're in close proximity and can pull in the same direction.

Phys.org, Oct. 2, 2017 - Kinesins ignore weak forces as they carry heavy loads.

They are still figuring kinesins out! If I am reading this correctly, they added in all the chemical actions/reactions to how one works and put several all in a cell simulation to see how they react. As the title says, the guy up front does all the heavy lifting.

The weak forces are things like other kinesins on the other side of the molecule going in the opposite direction. It has something to do with the angle the one up front connects with. It is like that one has all the say on where they are moving their cargo to.

Wild thinking there are nanometer sized protein machines running stuff around in my 15 trillion cells!

originally posted by: Devino

originally posted by: dashen
Its molecular clock work.
It all works on pressure and tension and chemical receptors and reactions

To me this appears to be a gross over-simplification almost to the point of being incorrect. I am not trying to disagree with you just pointing out the part of ‘how’ all this actually works as a big unknown. Scientific knowledge is replete with such examples.

originally posted by: dr1234
We know exactly how every process shown works.

Are you sure? I think we could say that we know what is happening, for the most part, and can predict what will happen, to a fair degree, yet to make the claim that we know “how” all of this happens seems like a giant leap.

The entropic nature of energy is said to be universally homogeneous except when it comes to life. Self-organization and/or negative entropy appears to defy this law of thermodynamics.

Actually, the self organization of life doesn't violate the second law of thermodynamics. The second law refers to a closed, or adiabatic, system where no heat is taken in or leaked out. The negative entropy referred to is really the Gibbs Free Energy, which is essentially the energy taken in from the environment and utilized by an organizational system like the cell. The Gibbs equation assumes constant temperature and pressure. The biochemist, Lehninger, who wrote a well known textbook, says that the disorder created in the surroundings of an organizational system like the cell compensates and balances energy in versus energy out. That explanation is probably too simplistic, but you get the point.