Charlie Lawford retweetledi
This is a single human cell. The white tubes are microtubules. The colored beads are ribosomes. You have 37 trillion of these.
Every cell in your body is a manufacturing plant running 24/7 without supervision.
Each ribosome (the colored beads) is assembling a protein right now. A single ribosome chains together about 20 amino acids per second. A typical mammalian cell contains millions of ribosomes. Every cell in your body is forming hundreds of millions of peptide bonds per second. Continuously.
The white worm-like tubes are microtubules, the cell's internal highway system. Motor proteins called kinesin walk along them on two protein legs, carrying cargo from one end of the cell to the other at around 800 nanometers per second. Each cell has thousands of these tracks with thousands of motor proteins walking on them simultaneously.
The blue mesh on the outside is the actin cortex. It holds the cell shape against pressure. It's also being torn down and rebuilt constantly. Every cell rewrites its own structural skeleton every few minutes.
Now scale that.
37 trillion cells. Each running millions of ribosomes. Each running hundreds of mitochondria producing ATP at roughly 100 million molecules per second. Your total daily ATP turnover is around your full body weight. You synthesize and consume your bodyweight in ATP every 24 hours.
The DNA in a single cell stretches 2 meters uncoiled. End to end across all 37 trillion cells, that's enough to reach the sun and back 250 times.
None of this is voluntary. None of it stops. It started when you were one cell and hasn't paused since.
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