Let me geek out a little bit
Although Biology and Genetics have always been a passion of mine, I have been away from both for quite a while now.
In such a rapidly evolving field this means that there is a) stuff I learned which was proven wrong and b) lots of new stuff I had no idea about.
So, I'm trying to catch up, with varying degrees of success as some of this stuff is kinda hard to wrap your head around but really? These things are amazing. The more is known about how Nature works the more astounded I get.
So here is an example of something new to me that I can explain in an analogy where a cell is like a house, our heroes are the cleaning staff, there is private security but sometimes they need to call the FBI and viruses are still devious little bastards...
Imagine the cell is a house where the people in it constantly create new things: furniture, pots, paintings, etc... Some of these things will become old, broken, they may not be right from the start or simply not match the general decor and purpose of the place. Hence, they must be destroyed.
This is where the cleaning staff comes in. They work in teams of 3: one points out the things to be destroyed, one puts tags on them (lots of tags, only one tag is not taken in consideration, it must be clearly marked) and the third carries the tags around.
Then there is a huge machine that sees the tags, grabs whatever is tagged and chews it to bits.
But there is a problem... this takes a while and sometimes something from outside (read virus and the like) needs to be found and destroyed asap.
There is a different team for that. They do security, quick clean up and send the remaining bits of the intruder to our FBI (aka, immune system) for ID and so they can publicize the photo, so to speak.
But there is a flaw in this rather elegant system... there is some stuff that the big machine can not destroy. Like it's a wood chipper and can't do much to something made of steel.
Viruses figure this out and cover themselves in steel before invading!
It's amazing, yeah?
/geek moment
What I'm talking about can be found here
In such a rapidly evolving field this means that there is a) stuff I learned which was proven wrong and b) lots of new stuff I had no idea about.
So, I'm trying to catch up, with varying degrees of success as some of this stuff is kinda hard to wrap your head around but really? These things are amazing. The more is known about how Nature works the more astounded I get.
So here is an example of something new to me that I can explain in an analogy where a cell is like a house, our heroes are the cleaning staff, there is private security but sometimes they need to call the FBI and viruses are still devious little bastards...
Imagine the cell is a house where the people in it constantly create new things: furniture, pots, paintings, etc... Some of these things will become old, broken, they may not be right from the start or simply not match the general decor and purpose of the place. Hence, they must be destroyed.
This is where the cleaning staff comes in. They work in teams of 3: one points out the things to be destroyed, one puts tags on them (lots of tags, only one tag is not taken in consideration, it must be clearly marked) and the third carries the tags around.
Then there is a huge machine that sees the tags, grabs whatever is tagged and chews it to bits.
But there is a problem... this takes a while and sometimes something from outside (read virus and the like) needs to be found and destroyed asap.
There is a different team for that. They do security, quick clean up and send the remaining bits of the intruder to our FBI (aka, immune system) for ID and so they can publicize the photo, so to speak.
But there is a flaw in this rather elegant system... there is some stuff that the big machine can not destroy. Like it's a wood chipper and can't do much to something made of steel.
Viruses figure this out and cover themselves in steel before invading!
It's amazing, yeah?
/geek moment
What I'm talking about can be found here