Do we have some nerdy stuff for you! Mara found this animation last night and we stayed up until midnight just watching it! It animates a process called Leukocyte Extravasation which is when White Blood Cells respond to inflammation in a tissue; a very normal/regular activity in the body.
What makes this cool is all the structures are actually what they look like and how they behave. Old animations used ball & stick or ribbon diagrams, this uses what's called space filling and takes into account the electron density of the atoms. One example is Crescentin, which a certain bacteria uses for mobility. Left is the ribbon, the right is the space filling diagrams:
Anyway, this animation was put together by the Howard Hughes Medical Center and a ground called BioVisions at Harvard University and another production company. The video comes in 3 qualities. All have audio explaining the processes:
Super Speed: For fast Internet connections. Watch this one if you can! The detail is amazing! If the audio/video is choppy, just hit pause and wait for the video to download fully.
High Speed: Good quality video
Slow Speed: OK video quality, kind of small though
If this piques your interest, you can see other videos that BioVisions has put together: http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/media.html
This is one of my favorite pictures from the video. It's the actin (fiber) and myosin ("walker") moving a vesicle to the cell membrane.
3 comments:
I think my head hurts....
cool to watch, though, even if I didn't really understand it.
You really are nerds!
Soooooo..... if I have it right, our bodies are made up of lots of small rolling insects?
I think the protein in the picture is the microtubules and kinesin. Actin microfilament and myosin is another system but not responsiable for vesicular transpoter in the cell.
I like this animation very much~
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