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Published November 5, 2014 | Published
Journal Article Open

The quantified cell

Abstract

The microscopic world of a cell can be as alien to our human-centered intuition as the confinement of quarks within protons or the event horizon of a black hole. We are prone to thinking by analogy—Golgi cisternae stack like pancakes, red blood cells look like donuts—but very little in our human experience is truly comparable to the immensely crowded, membrane-subdivided interior of a eukaryotic cell or the intricately layered structures of a mammalian tissue. So in our daily efforts to understand how cells work, we are faced with a challenge: how do we develop intuition that works at the microscopic scale?

Additional Information

© 2014 Flamholz et al. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). Two months after publication it is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0). Received: Sep 2, 2014; Accepted: Sep 11, 2014. We thank Niv Antonovsky, Caleb Cassidy-Amstutz, Dan Davidi, Arren Bar-Even, David Drubin, Eric Estrin, Daniel Fletcher, Shmuel Gleizer, Bruce Goode, Rachel Hood, Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, Elad Noor, Ben Oakes, Ross Pedersen, Jeremy Roop, Alex Rubinsteyn, Alvaro Sanchez, and Julie Theriot for discussions and comments that were vital in helping us communicate the value of biological numeracy. We also thank David Goodsell for help in preparing Figure 1 and Nigel Orme for Figure 2.

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