4 ms·
That reminds me of something interesting about biological cells. The molecules in that thick stew might be bouncing around at 20-250 miles per hour, depending o
by Terr_ 2y ago
That reminds me of something interesting about biological cells. The molecules in that thick stew might be bouncing around at 20-250 miles per hour, depending on their size.
- mr_toad 2y agoWhat’s really mind blowing is how fast the gluons inside the protons inside those molecules are moving.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoMore importantly, this means that any given molecule will, in a very short time, bump into almost every other molecule in the cell. Thus, the answer to the question, how does protein X find fuel, or resource Y, or a protein Z it needs? Simple: it doesn't - it eventually just bumps into it. Similarly, in simple cells, there may be no need to transport stuff from place to place - chemical diffusion is fast enough!
- Retric 2y agoMeanwhile larger cells massively benefit by speeding up those processes. So there exists lot of structures to group and or transport where different molecules are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golgi_apparatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golgi_apparatus Similarly, organelles group related process together. So for example DNA related proteins are in a nucleus not inefficiently bouncing off the cell wall. Which helps explain why mitochondria were so beneficial. Keeping a bunch of related machinery all tightly clustered together it makes more efficient use of each individual protein and can quickly replace anything that gets damaged. ATP however can diffuse through the cell just fine because so many processes use it that extra copies isn’t a major issue.