The Most Complex Language in the World

you are cells your muscles organs skin and hair are in your blood and in your bones cells are biological robots they do not want anything they feel nothing they are never sad or happy they are simply here and now they are As conscious as a stone, a chair or a star of neutrons, cells simply follow their programming that has been evolving and changing for billions of years shaped by natural selection, they are impossible machines and yet here they are driven entirely by the fundamental forces of the universe, the smallest. Unit of life right at the border where physics becomes biology.

Sometimes to get a truer understanding of how wonderful something is, you need to hold your breath and dive very deep to learn what cells are and how they work. Look around the room you are sitting in. Right now, let's fill it from top to bottom with trillions of grains of sand, billions of grains of rice, hundreds of thousands of grapes, a few thousand apples, and a dozen watermelons. This is what the inside of your cells looks like in terms of numbers.

most

ly full of water molecules grains of sand water gives the inside of cells the consistency of soft gelatin and allows other things to move easily or al

most

all other things rice and fruit are proteins several thousand of millions in total more than 10,000 different types depending on the function of the cell, your cells are basically robots of proteins, as is all life, in fact, all the solid and fat-free parts of your body are mostly made of protein, even your bones, proteins are dead things that make life happen, how does this work?

Vital cells need to do many very difficult things to stay alive, obtain food and eliminate waste, grow and build structures, escape from danger or react to stimuli, make copies of themselves, etc., all of this is achieved by speaking the

language

of life and the words of life. this

language

is proteins this is how this language works in a few words it all starts with amino acids small organic molecules are the alphabet of the language of life there are 21 different ones like different letters amino acid an amino acid b c and so on yes if you put together about 50 amino acids, they form one protein which in the language of life is a word and if you put many of these protein words together you get a sentence called biological pathway, let's simplify a little and say, for example, that your cell needs to break down sugar with the language of life they can be necessary the amino acids of the letters b r e a and K to form the protein word break and then combine this word with other protein words to form a biological pathway sentence that means to break down sugar in reality this language of Life is so

complex

that it defines the imagination .

You need to know about 8,000 words to speak a human language really well, but in the language of life there are an estimated 20,000, and while the average English word has five letters, human proteins have an average of 3,175. amino acids, the longest protein has more than 30,000 and cells need to execute thousands of steps at any time, if they ever stop speaking the language of life, they die, fine, but how do meaningless cells speak such a language?

complex

? Let's dig a little deeper. There are 21 amino acids that can combine to form proteins and proteins are made up of dozens, hundreds or thousands of amino acids.

For the average protein length of a human cell of 375 amino acids, you get an astonishing 6.8*10 of the power of 495 possible proteins. cells can produce a billion times more than atoms in the universe, most of these possible proteins are useless, just like human language, most random combinations of letters are just gibberish, so you need to know what words and what proteins make up a language. to speak it correctly and this is the work of your DNA, a long sequence of instructions if you unravel the DNA of a cell, it would be approximately 2 m long, all the DNA in your body combined in one long chain would reach the Sun and return more than 20 times.

About 1% of your DNA is made up of genes that are basically protein dictionaries containing all the words in the language of life that your cells speak, but genes are also the construction manuals for all the proteins your cells need to function. function the rest of your DNA. It's probably not useless, but basically it's like a set of rules, it's like the grammar book of the language of life, what proteins should be built, at what time, how many of them you need, what protein words go together and why, okay, letters, words, sentences, dictionary. and grammar, but of course, all of this is just a metaphor for something tremendously complex, let's dig a little deeper to glimpse the reality of how dead proteins create life.

Now that we have some basic principles, we have the opportunity to understand how dead things are created. life together and for that we need a fundamental force of the universe electromagnetism the elementary particles that form the atoms that make up amino acids have different charges that attract or repel each other the 21 different amino acids all have slightly different charges some are more negative others are more positive when your cells build proteins they put together different amino acids into chains, basically long chains, now due to the different charges of the amino acids used these chains start to fold on themselves, this folding process is so complex that we haven't done it yet.

I completely understood how exactly it works, but in a nutshell, 1D strings are converted to 3D structures. Proteins are basically 3D puzzle pieces with a very specific shape. In the

world

of proteins, shape is everything because its 3D shape determines which areas of a protein are charged which way and this determines how it can interact with other proteins. All of these differently charged puzzle pieces can bond or repel each other when put together. Their charge changes can cause them to change their shape, which then turns them into a new protein, a new tool that can make. new things this is what makes proteins so incredibly powerful that you can do basically everything with them, they can come together like Lego pieces to build complex structures, they can dismantle things, they can form complex micromachines that use energy to do work and perhaps most surprising is that they can do it. transmit information let's say there is a toxic chemical entering your cell there may be a protein shaped to bind to that toxin if the protein encounters that toxin it changes its shape with that new shape now it can bind to a different protein that changes its shape again this A new protein activates a micromachine that binds directly to your DNA to order the production of a special protein that acts as an antidote to the toxin.

This cascade of interaction is the path we talked about before. A phrase in the language of life, so without a single one. Active thinking proteins have solved a problem and saved the life of the cell. In reality, these paths may have dozens or hundreds of steps. The way life operates is so incredible or somehow induces incredibly complex interactions between dumb and dead proteins that create a less dumb, less dead cell. somewhere around here life happens but we still don't know what life is how dumb things are together we need another analogy so let's talk about ants ants share a fundamental property with cells they are really dumb since a single ant just It will stumble uselessly but if you put together a lot of ants, they exchange information and do amazing things, they build complex structures, they organize themselves, they take care of their babies or they attack their enemies, even though they are individually stupid, together they become something bigger, this phenomenon happens everywhere. nature and is called emergency, it is the observation that the entities have. properties and abilities that its parts do not have this is how everything works in your body your cells are bags of proteins guided by chemistry but together these proteins form a living being that can do many really sophisticated things cells are mindless robots that even They are Dumberer than ants, but many of them, acting together, form specialized tissues and organ systems, from muscles that make your heart beat to brain cells that make you think.

If you look outside, at the incredible dimension and scale of space, a place where forever is real. It's almost impossible not to feel a little small, not special, but if you look inside who you really are, you discover an almost indescribable complexity, the beautiful language of life, almost everything in the universe reveals hidden layers of complexity if you look closer. and if you have the knowledge to understand it to help you with that, we have created a series of lessons to take your scientific knowledge to the next level, made in collaboration with our friends at shiny.org, these lessons give you a deeper understanding of the topics of our most popular themes.

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