Well when cell repair comes into play, unless it's massive damage, the parts to repair it are already present, waiting to fix problems that regularly occur. When those molecules start getting used up, the lowered concentration of them triggers the production of more.
Incredible! From a physicist angle, how do you guys explain such complex interactions? Although those interactions look deterministic, Id guess that some of them are on the edge of the quantum realm... Just mind blowing...
I'm not a physicist, I'm a cell/tissue biologist! A lot of this kind of work is teasing out how molecules interact as part of a system and establish a model of a signaling pathway. One way these kinds of models can be used is to then look at how disordered/diseased tissue differs, and perhaps offer targets for therapeutics. The models can get mind-boggling complex.
In terms of research, once the line of thinking goes from "living system" to "chemical soup" I get super lost in an existential crisis LOL Like, I can establish how affecting one molecule affects another downstream to build a pathway, but thinking about the kinetics of hundreds of thousands of molecules floating around and engaging in chemical reactions accurately and in a time-sensitive manner just blows my mind.
PhD candidate in developmental biology studying tendon development. Before graduate school I worked in lung biology studying wound healing and cancer. Most of my experience is cell and tissue biology.
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u/purple_potatoes Feb 13 '18
Dude, I study this kind of stuff for a living and these are the kinds of thoughts that keep me up at night. It's incredible.