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This is actually a heavily criticized animation within the computational biophysics community. Our intuition for physical determinism breaks down at the nanosca
by rotskoff 13y ago
This is actually a heavily criticized animation within the computational biophysics community. Our intuition for physical determinism breaks down at the nanoscale. One major fault of this video is that, at low Reynolds number, there's essentially no inertia. So the representation of kinesin taking deterministic, 100% processive steps is an absurd idealization. The motion is dominated by thermal fluctuations (which, by the way, are occurring on a nanosecond timescale).
At the same, even as a biophysicist, I think these animations are superb learning tools. Those beautifully rendered animations actually describe the mechanism in far greater detail than, say, textbook diagrams. One should just be aware that fluctuations dominate at these scales.