When cells divide, their 'internal organs' or organelles must be apportioned to the daughter cells correctly. This study reveals the mechanisms underlying the behaviour of endoplasmic reticulum – the organelle at the heart of protein production from the RNA code – in cell division
Read the published research paper here
Video from work by Katherine R. Rollins and J. Todd Blankenship
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA
Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Published in Development, November 2023
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It was so hard to write that chapter of Even Though You're Kryptonian, and try to figure out what the audience would need to know (assuming that most of the audience didn't have biology fresh on their minds). I ended up summing it to "okay, the audience needs to know that blood is important, and that the trait is maternally passed" and also "the audience needs to know this comes down to quantum information, which can't be cloned". When Nia says "skip the science", that is because I took out full paragraph explanations that were originally written there when I went back to editing 🤣
Buuuut this is tumblr, so I'll summarize here!
Quantum cloning is actually impossible (and would break the universe if it were possible), which Lena notes. On the TV show, they say they need Kara's DNA, and then get really sad when it's destroyed... but Lena is a scientist, replicating DNA is super easy, she definitely would've done that before loading the device!! So in my fic, we're going with quantum signatures, because the sadness around needing to reset the device to fight the phantoms makes sense.
The stable marriage problem (also called the "stable matching problem") is an actual thing in algorithms, with applications in economics. It's not specific to marriage - you can use similar algorithms to optimize which schools students attend, for instance. And it's always solvable, given certain conditions, with one of those conditions being that the two groups are distinct (like colleges are group 1, students are group 2 - a college can't attend a college & a student can't attend a student). If you don't have distinct groups, it turns into the stable roommate problem, which is not guaranteed to be solvable.
So basically my headcanon is that Krypton would look at algorithms and say "We can't have gay marriage, that's not algorithmically efficient!" because Krypton is the type of screwed up society that thinks everything should be done by algorithm.
Chloroplasts are organelles in plants. (Organelles are just organs for cells - instead of hearts and livers and kidneys, cells have things like mitochondria and nuclei and endoplasmic reticula.) Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell? Well, so are chloroplasts (in plants!).
Lena at some point on the TV show tells the group that Reign's cells are more like plant cells, which Kara confirms as how kryptonians convert sunlight to energy (which is what a chloroplast does). But I say they're not quite chloroplasts because they have to use a different dye - kryptonians aren't green. Lutein is a yellow dye in plants (think fall leaves) that could probably be masked by the natural melanin in human skin. So that's what I made as the thing that causes kryptonians to give off a quantum signature - the conversion of sunlight to power.
Organelles really are passed from the mother (egg) to the child. Sperm doesn't have room for much besides DNA. (Though for reasons not yet explained, kryptonian biology is going to work a little differently than Lena expects.)
As for sulfates, that's just a category of salt, and they're plentiful in the ocean. I needed something that killed libido... unfortunately, most of the real stuff that would kill libido are things like alcohol or opioids, and I didn't want kryptonian kids running around stoned all the time. But salt can contribute to high blood pressure, which can lower libido - sooooo let's just pretend that kryptonians are particularly likely to experience this side effect, while not being killed by blood pressure. Their biology is different anyway!
gave notice and did not cry until after closing zoom 👍 i am overdramatic for sure but i really can’t be like “it’s just a job” because it actually means a lot to me to have spent almost 5 years with a bunch of lgbt people producing books on subjects that align with my values. i remember a post i made during my internship where i was talking about whether i would be able to accept a full-time offer because i was still so easily triggered by the (medical) subject matter i encountered day to day that it didn’t seem possible, but the healing and growth i’ve experienced since then have been insane. i think i’m going to cross stitch the company logo and frame it and send it to my boss bc i’m not comfortable saying any version of this in words tbh
Speaking of connections between cellular biology and regency romance novels: the reason I understood the "reticular" part endoplasmic reticulum and reticular connective tissues was from all those regency heroines carrying reticules to the balls.
Drawing together our information for the cereal aleurone system (Figure 18.11), we can hypothesize that binding of bioactive gibberellin to GID1 leads to degradation of the DELLA protein.
"Plant Physiology and Development" int'l 6e - Taiz, L., Zeiger, E., Møller, I.M., Murphy, A.
Cellular fate and energy factories: unraveling how surface receptors meet mitochondria for brain cell survival
The human brain is an organ that takes nearly from 20 to 25% of the energy the body needs. This high energy demand for neuronal functions depends on the transport and precise distribution of mitochondria — the energy-generating cell organelles — in each neuron. In neurons, the transport process of mitochondria is determining, since these organelles must be present along all axons and dendrites to…
I have never studied so much in my life but suddenly I actually want to do well in school like oh shit right in getting this degree cuz I want to not cuz I have to wow that changes everything
A protein called VAPA on the membrane of the endoplasmic reticulum – a cell's largest organelle, and where proteins are produced – is vital for cell movement (motility) as it mediates cytoskeleton activity and regulates adhesion to the substrate at a migrating cell's leading edge
Read the published research article here
Video from work by Hugo Siegfried and colleagues
Université Paris Cité, CNRS, Institut Jacques Monod, Paris, France
Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Published in eLife, March 2024
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the urge to become a marine biologist simply to make “there are many benefits to being a marine biologist” jokes (also because marine life is so RAD) vs my 64% in my biology class: FIGHT