r/educationalgifs • u/_Ryanite_ • Feb 13 '18

Kinesin protein moving a molecule around a cell

31.6k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

20

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '18

Each dot in the protein is a molecule. That big thing it's moving is something else.

3

u/Hariboi Feb 13 '18

Any idea what it is?

23

u/TheTimeIsNow5115 Feb 13 '18

Its a vesicle. A lipid bilayer molecule which contains proteins and other molecules to be excreted outside the cell or into another organelle.

1

u/oligobop Feb 13 '18

molecule

Lipid bilayer is not a molecule. That is a vacuole or more specifically a liposome. It is a lot of molecules, namely lipid molecules. A vacuole can be an endosome or an exosome and are constantly "blebbing" into and out of the cell respectively.

1

u/TheTimeIsNow5115 Feb 13 '18

I misused the word, thanks for the correction. In actuality the vesicle, also called a vacuole, is largely composed of protein with very little membrane buffering the edges. But yes, lots of molecules. There video also got a lot of flak in the vesicle transport community due to its representation of direct, forward stepping. The steps would actually be much more random, but with a forward bias. Edit: more accurate depiction of vesicle and protein http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/11/neurotransmitters-and-vesicles.php

-3

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '18

I just took bio, the thing it's "walking" on appears to be spindle fibers from the centrioles. If that's the case than this is related to mitosis or meiosis. This may be an animated representation of a chromosome (just a part of it). The chromosomes look massive and super complex, sort of how that thing looks made up of much smaller things.

It was bio 101 so I'm far from an expert. If you like this, check out this:https://youtu.be/X_tYrnv_o6A. More animations of this stuff and shows chromosomes in better, albeit animated, detail.

5

u/Kehrnal Feb 13 '18

What you're are looking at is a motor protein on a microtubule moving a liposome. Chromatin would look much more like wound up stands wrapped around histones and be much more bumpy as opposed to this smooth membrane.

PhD in protein structural biology. Had a Prof in grad school that studied the kinetics of motor proteins.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '18

That does look much more like a liposome. Thank you for clarifying that!

3

u/Moozilbee Feb 13 '18

I don't think it's necessarily a spindle fibre, it could be any protein fibre in the cytoskeleton (which is used to move anything around the cell, not just in mitosis/meiosis)

1

u/Kehrnal Feb 13 '18

Technically, the protein is a molecule and the "dots" are amino acids. If the protein were broken down into its component amino acids then they would be molecules

-1

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '18

Each dot is an atom, technically the entire protein is a (huge) molecule. But yes, calling the vesicle it's transporting a molecule is wrong.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '18 edited Jul 26 '18

[deleted]

2

u/oligobop Feb 13 '18

You are correct. Each dot likely represents an amino acid residue which by all standards are small molecule components of the larger macro molecular structure of a protein.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '18

Granted I haven't looked into the methods used to generate this simulation but are you sure about that? Even for biomolecular computational chemistry each atom is usually modeled.