I think David Goodsell's beautiful paintings, in his book Machinery of Life, were the first serious attempt to depict how crammed a cell is (page down past the

I think David Goodsell's beautiful paintings, in his book Machinery of Life, were the first serious attempt to depict how crammed a cell is (page down past the pictures of individual molecules to get the the cell cross-sections): https://ccsb.scripps.edu/goodsell/machinery-of-life-reducedillustrations/ https://ccsb.scripps.edu/goodsell/machinery-of-life-reducedi... Here's an interview with him, explaining and showing his process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0rPXTJzpLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0rPXTJzpLE Here's his recent painting of a coronavirus protease: https://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/242 https://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/242 The other thing missing from those videos is any indication of how random these processes are. At one point, an actin filament assembles by having monomers fly directly at the tip and stack neatly together. It's not like that. In reality, there are all sorts of molecules just randomly moshing around, and occasionally, an actin monomer will bump into the tip of the filament and stick, because it has a binding site. But sometimes one will bump into the tip and not stick! Sometimes, the tip of the filament will fall off! The growth is purely statistical: monomers are more likely to stick than to fall off, and more likely to stick than some random unrelated protein is to stick.