I'm still astounded that that machinery builds itself.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc trk
The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet. "Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"
I've seen these animations many times by Drew Berry but love watching them again and again.
And Veritasium is a great channel !
The helicase motor that unravels DNA during replication spins at 5,000 to 10,000 RPM.
Biological motors used to be considered impossible. Flagellum motors hit 17,000 RPM. "The exact mechanism for torque generation is still poorly understood."
I think you are confusing two things here. A biological motor in a macroscopic organism is impossible because a single-piece organism cannot have freely rotating parts. There is no such restriction for molecular machines.
Jeroen Belleman
That's cool, thanks. It's like a super complicated "game of life". Bacteria swap bits of DNA back and forth, so if one of them stumbled on the way to make a better 'walker', then they could share it with others. It's like everyone sharing bits of code.
George H.
Huh, well at a guess it's some sort of electro-statics.. but what do I know? GH
By definition a single piece can't have rotating components. It's one piece.
Corkscrew flagellum of single-cell critters sure do rotate.
Why invent something when you can steal it?
You can continuously rotate a can of beer in the palm of your hand. You rotate it ~180 degrees next to your ear, then the next 180 by passing it under your armpit, then next to your ear again, until you get bored.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
A macroscopic organism, even a microscopic organism is hardly single-piece. The cell in the OP consists of thousands or millions of "pieces". Many of which are mobile and many of those that aren't are capable of motion.
Much/most of biological mechanical force comes from proteins changing shape, initiated by other molecules binding & unbinding to/from specific sites in the protein. ATP being the energy source for such.
Some suggest that this may originally have been symbiotic combination of different organisms, a bit like mitochondria are thought to have become symbiotic with eukaryotic cells. I'm not a biologist.
Jeroen Belleman
no, they nutate.
A key point here, however, is that you are moving in three dimensions in order to make the target move in a continuous rotation.
A chromosome is a long strand, but it's stored in compact folded star shape, with pulley-sort-of nucleosomes at the angles.
Sounds like an autocorrelation machine to me.
Many snails and related gastropods have an internal wheel that rotates freely for laying down and retrieving mucus. I don't know whether it can be classified as a "motor" or not (I guess that depends on your definition), but I think it is the only known macroscopic biological wheel.
Here's one showing how the big guns clear infected cells from the host. Dun no how accurate all the micro-details are but I assume they're correct. In the case of viral infection, the T cells are attracted to fragments of vira l protein on the cell membrane. All the vaccines have been observed to prod uce the adaptation of NK killer cells for this effect.
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Is it made of living tissue? Do you have a reference?
Jeroen Belleman
Wow, that's neat.
The bacteria is a single cell organism, if you divide it more finely the distinction between living and non-living loses meaning.
the flagellum is some sort of protein.
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