[HN Gopher] The secret lives of cells - as never seen before
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The secret lives of cells - as never seen before
 
Author : panabee
Score  : 19 points
Date   : 2021-11-05 19:38 UTC (3 hours ago)
 
web link (www.nature.com)
w3m dump (www.nature.com)
 
| 323 wrote:
| 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
 
| richardatlarge wrote:
| 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.
 
  | dekhn wrote:
  | 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.
 
  | SHAKEDECADE wrote:
  | 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.
 
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