'Mysteries of the Cell'

'Mysteries' include:

* Do Lipid Rafts Exist? 

* How Does a Cell Know Its Size? 

* How Does the Cell Position Its Proteins? 

* How Do Hungry Cells Start Eating Themselves? 

* Does a Gene’s Location in the Nucleus Matter? 

and others

Plus: an overview of 'the new cell anatomy'.

The waltzing kludge of eukaryotic life

At its heart, [the idea] is deceptively simple: we have two genomes that need to work together, and you can tell how well they’re doing this by the strength of the free radical leak. From that simple concept, you can logically derive how fitness, fertility and lifespan are linked in different species. You can also predict the process of ageing and the onset of age-related diseases within individuals. 

“A lot of this has to be true on logical grounds,” says Nick Lane. “We know that there is co-adaptation between these two genomes and many predictions emerge seamlessly from some simple reflections on that process. The big question is whether it’s important in the greater scheme of things.”

-- from The two-genome waltz: how the threat of mismatched partners shapes complex life by Ed Yong

To see inside a grain of sand

A very short introduction to molecular animation

You, the living

We have so retreated into molecular biology that we no longer stop to consider what entire cells do. It's almost as if you were putting the notes of a musical score under the microscope without ever hearing the symphony.

-- Brian Ford plays the sound of signals inside cells.

What is true for E. coli...

In the old joke a person is not "dead", they are just "metabolically different". Here, though, is evidence that organisms from microbe to elephant are metabolically the same (or pretty close):

"The largest organism we studied is the elephant, which has a metabolic rate of 1 Watt per kilogram, and the smallest is a bacterium with a metabolic rate of 4 Watts/kg"... Using the formulae that had previously been used to calculate the metabolic rate within separate classes of animals, you would have expected a multimillion-fold difference.

-- Is there an optimum speed of life?

Earth dive

virtually