The interior of a cell is densely packed with millions of molecules vibrating, jostling, and moving about. Sugar molecules fly through a cell at 250 miles per hour, ricocheting off of ribosomes, organelles, cytoskeletal fibers, and enzymes. Indeed, every protein in the cell is hit by about 1013 water molecules each second. This chaos makes biology seem hopelessly convoluted. With everything moving so quickly, how can we begin to understand biomolecules' As with other hard-to-intuit quantities in science, one could look up biological rates using resources like PubMed or BioNumbers, to discover facts like 'water flows through aquaporin at 100 million molecules per second,' or 'yeast transcribes RNA at 0.12 molecules per minute.' But knowing a number doesn't necessarily give one a feel for it. Are those rates' fast' How do they compare to protein folding' Or enzymatic activity' Or squeezing a muscle' We can answer this question with a quantitative metaphor, by visualizing the most...
learn more
