Pretty pictures, pretty movies

Where else can you get to see beautiful images and movies other than in biology?

Here’s an image of cytoskeleton that you can just keep staring at:

Red – actin filaments, Green – Microtubules, Blue – nuclei

These filamentous structures (microtubules and actin) are not complete without a set of proteins called motor proteins. These proteins are great transporters in cells. Simply put, they pick up the cargo that has to be transported, hitch hike on these filaments and deliver the cargo to their destinations. And why do we need such a well developed mechanism – One good reason is the need for speed. The cytoplasm is a viscoelastic material and if stuff were to be moved within the cell from one end to the other just by random diffusion and no directed motion at all (as we see on these tracks), one can imagine how inefficient that would be.

Here’s one of my first movies (yay!) that I took in this current lab that I’m rotating. Its kinesin moving on Microtubules. Microtubules have a + end and a – end and the kinesin that I am studying moves towards the + end. Its easy to see which is the + end of the microtubule as you see bright spots of concentrated kinesins at these ends.