[benjismith]

This reminds me of the amazing molecular animations of Drew Berry, which he showed in this TED talk:

https://youtu.be/WFCvkkDSfIU?si=JNe06VS8TjIrHpqh

Which was 12 years ago! After watching that video, I had a much greater appreciation for how our bodies are made up of trillions of tiny protein machines. Fascinating stuff!!

[shagie]

https://xvivo.com/examples/the-inner-life-of-the-cell/

I didn't realize there was also a Powering the Cell: Mitochondria video.

The classic one narrated - https://youtu.be/QplXd76lAYQ

One of my pandemic YouTube binges was watching Ron Vale videos about kinesin and dynein. https://youtu.be/9RUHJhskW00 https://youtu.be/lVwKiWSu8XE https://youtu.be/FRtqfpO8THU

And searching for Ron Vale will bring a number of other videos about molecular machines.

[dekhn]

My friend in grad school was in Ron's group. He built a microscope that visualized individual kinesin molecules and measured their speed using fluorescent labelling. The whole thing was held together with a bunch of scripts written in LabView. Ron had oodles of money and was able to support long-term software development of open source software like MicroManager, which gives a common interface to a wide range of microscopy software.

The systems he studies are literally little motors that can attach to biological surfaces and drive around in specific directions, pick up payloads, and then drive to other places. They work in very different way from how humans engineer tiny motors and understanding/engineering their behavior was a major focus in the early 2000s.

[shagie]

> My friend in grad school was in Ron's group. He built a microscope that visualized individual kinesin molecules and measured their speed using fluorescent labelling.

In vitro motility of yeast cytoplasmic dynein - https://youtu.be/lVwKiWSu8XE?si=Su29neym0wg9DalR&t=627

[dekhn]

Yeah, exactly that, but with kinesin instead of dynein (everybody started with myosin, but loss interest, and moved to kinesin and then dynein) and about 10 years earlier.

Those little blobs moving along the filaments are ~10-100 nanometers, you wouldn't normally be able to see them, but they managed to tether fluorescent (glowing) molecules to them and those act like point sources of light, which allows for precise localization because the PSF of a point is approximately gaussian and finding the centroid of a gaussian is trivial.

[benjismith]

Nice! Thank you for the links!

[adkaplan]

Appreciate the share. I've seen a compilation of these clips out of context and loved them. Never figured out where they came from. They really are amazing in striking the balance between organic and mechanistic. The Kinesin in particular are cute.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyUtbn0O5Y&t=2s

This video shows it quite well too. EDIT: looks like someone else shared the same.

[mncharity]

> The Kinesin in particular are cute.

Yes... though regrettably, that render is profoundly misleading. The payload is actually flailing around violently. Dancing in the molecular nanoscale moshpit from hell. Between each glacial step, the payload basically explores its entire tethered configuration space. Picture balloon in a hurricane tied to a mouse clinging to a wire, rather than a donkey towing a barge. The render optimizes for art over education, for pretty over engendering misconceptions.

Consider filming a runner, and only showing frames where the arms and legs are in the same unmoving positions, the rigid person quietly floating along over the ground. Or a soccer game render, of floating statues. Not without value, but profoundly misleading. Especially for the poor alien student, deeply unfamiliar with animal life and planetary surfaces.

One nice aspect of TFA, is rendering a moment frozen in time. Rendering non-bogus dynamics remains a hard open problem.

[jryan49]

I loved reading this paper https://philpapers.org/archive/NICITC.pdf (was linked on HN a while ago) which actually challenges that viewpoint.

Disclaimer: I'm not a biologist :)