Even while I’ve neglected this blog, my previous post on The Inner Life of the Cell remains quite popular. David Bolinksy, one of the creators of the video, gave a TED talk on making the movie. His talk is not particularly interesting from a scientific perspective, but one thing that he emphasizes that deserves restatement is the view of the cell as a series of micromachines. A lot of current biologocial research focuses on understanding how proteins, nucleic acids, small molecules, and all the other contents of a cell, assemble together to form higher order structures that perform complex reactions. One of the challenges that has arisen in modern biology is taking large scale datasets that we’ve generated (i.e. the human genome, gene expresssion studies, etc), and using them to understand how all the different parts of the cell talk to one another. This global approach to biology is relatively young, so understanding, visualizing, and analyzing these data is a huge, new challenge. Videos like this one, while perhaps not the most detailed representations of biology, are helpful in communicating this global view of the cell. Plus it looks pretty cool.
Tags: complexes, Inner Life of the Cell, making
