Name: The wonders of the molecular world, animated | Janet Iwasa
Uploaded: 2020-05-07T18:30:26.000Z
Duration: 6 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

a place known for having some of the most awe-inspiring

It's easy to be overwhelmed by these amazing views,

and to be really fascinated by these sometimes alien-looking formations.

As a scientist, I love observing the natural world.

I'm much more interested in understanding the natural world

I'm a molecular animator, and I work with other researchers

to create visualizations of molecules that are so small,

These molecules are smaller than the wavelength of light,

which means that we can never see them directly,

So how do I create visualizations of things

can spend their entire professional careers

working to understand one molecular process.

To do this, they carry out a series of experiments

that each can tell us a small piece of the puzzle.

One kind of experiment can tell us about the protein shape,

about what other proteins it might interact with,

and another can tell us about where it can be found in a cell.

And all of these bits of information can be used to come up with a hypothesis,

a story, essentially, of how a molecule might work.

My job is to take these ideas and turn them into an animation.

because it turns out that molecules can do some pretty crazy things.

But these animations can be incredibly useful for researchers

to communicate their ideas of how these molecules work.

They can also allow us to see the molecular world

a brief tour of what I consider to be some of the natural wonders

These kinds of cells need to go crawling around in our bodies

in order to find invaders like pathogenic bacteria.

This movement is powered by one of my favorite proteins

which is part of what's known as the cytoskeleton.

actin filaments are constantly being built and taken apart.

The actin cytoskeleton plays incredibly important roles in our cells.

Actin is also involved in a different kind of movement.

In our muscle cells, actin structures form these regular filaments

When our muscles contract, these filaments are pulled together

and they go back to their original position

Other parts of the cytoskeleton, in this case microtubules,

are responsible for long-range transportation.

They can be thought of as basically cellular highways

that are used to move things from one side of the cell to the other.

Unlike our roads, microtubules grow and shrink,

This particular motor protein is known as dynein,

and its known to be able to work together in groups

that almost look, at least to me, like a chariot of horses.

As you see, the cell is this incredibly changing, dynamic place,

where things are constantly being built and disassembled.

are harder to take apart than others, though.

in order to make sure that structures are taken apart in a timely manner.

That job is done in part by proteins like these.

of which there are many types in the cell,

by basically pulling individual proteins through a central hole.

When these kinds of proteins don't work properly,

the types of proteins that are supposed to get taken apart

can sometimes stick together and aggregate

and that can give rise to terrible diseases, such as Alzheimer's.

And now let's take a look at the nucleus,

which houses our genome in the form of DNA.

our DNA is cared for and maintained by a diverse set of proteins.

DNA is wound around proteins called histones,

which enable cells to pack large amounts of DNA into our nucleus.

These machines are called chromatin remodelers,

and the way they work is that they basically scoot the DNA

and they allow new pieces of DNA to become exposed.

This DNA can then be recognized by other machinery.

In this case, this large molecular machine

that tells it it's at the beginning of a gene.