Biology is a Burrito: A text- and visual-based journey through a living cell

Two books that I highly recommend to give you a visual and numbers view of the cell:

“The Machinery of Life” by David Goodsell is full of illustrations like the ones show in the article and really gave me a sense of what k might imagine when reading about the cell.

“Cell Biology by the Numbers” by Ron Milo and Rob Philips is full of order of magnitude calculations of about the processes of the cell. How fast are they, over what distance, how much, etc.

If you liked David Goodsell’s illustration you can find more of his work at https://ccsb.scripps.edu/goodsell/. I’m a huge fan.

> For many years, I had an intense aversion to mathematics. Biology was my refuge because it was simple: Read the textbook, memorize the facts, and ace the exam. (The only reason I majored in biochemistry as a college student was because it didn't have a multivariable calculus requirement.)

Every part of this passage is a shockingly accurate description of myself. I felt that I was bad at math and did a biochem degree because it meant I could skip Cal III. Now, I'm a computational biologist and I've mostly made up with math.

Lets hear it for Van der Waals forces! Go team!

The painting is wonderful. Yes, it's a snapshot in time of a dynamic state. All paintings are!

Life is amazing. Can anyone recommend good modern starting points to someone who would want to learn more about how living beings work (from bottom up)? It has been a while since I actively delved into Biology (my school days).

What a beautiful depiction. Reminds me of high fidelity 3D animation videos I used to watch about DNA replication, cell signalling etc.

One of the most fascinating parts to me was DNA transcription. The engineering is quite precise.

Found the video I was referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY

biology is a monad?

> It's a wonder that cells get anything done at all.

> The first time I did these calculations, I felt an intense appreciation for biology. And now, I want everyone else to feel the same. We ought to teach students of biology to think as mathematicians: to carefully quantify biology, to think in absolute units, and to develop a feeling for the organism.

It was interesting to read this article, but I think I would’ve understood a lot more if this entire piece had been (or were) an animated video that described it. Text and a few animations don’t do enough justice for the passion, knowledge and detail that’s in this article, IMO.

Logically that the burrito metaphor can explain monads, implies that the burrito metaphor can explain biology.

Lets hear it for Van der Waals forces! Go team!

> A typical E. coli cell, after all, measures about one micrometer across.

Bit nitpicky here but ... he wrote a typical E. coli cell.

Naturally bacteria have different size ranges, depending on many factors - nutrients, temperature, genome and so forth; e. g. look at how huge Thiomargarita namibiensis is.

But the 1 µm as average here given for E. coli, is not correct:

https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?id=117344&...

Length 1.78±0.54 μm

So while +/- at the lower end may be 1.24 µm, the max range here would be 2.42 µm, which is what I had more in mind (e. g. roughly about 2µm). I don't have all of the data to be able to say which is the exact value, but I think the website at bionumbers.hms.harvard.ed is more realistic, so I would say that E. coli's best average is more at 2µm than 1µm.