" Just one living cell in the human body is more complex than New York City."
This is what L.C. Pauling, the father of the chemical bond and Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954, said about the human cell.
Starting from this parallelism, I decided to start a new series of scientific pills entitled “Welcome to celltropolis”, with the aim of making it easier for non-experts to understand what happens inside our cells.
An ambitious and complex project, born from the need to counteract all those fake news that come up every day, providing the main and necessary notions to discern what is true from what is pure propaganda and falsehood.
To do this, I will use the parallelism with the metropolis proposed by the famous Nobel Prize almost 70 years ago. Obviously, it will be an exemplification of everything, because the structure known at that time was more complex than the city of New York, the one known now is much more so.
As an introduction, imagine the cell as a large super-crowded metropolis (there are no empty spaces inside it) surrounded by walls with various drawbridges, watchtowers and a few holes.
Inside, there is another structure surrounded by walls (the nucleus) that contains the instructions for building and managing the entire metropolis (the DNA); it is the “fundamental” structure, without it there is no life, there is no metropolis, and for this reason it is protected by other walls. Confined between the two barricades, there are all the known cellular structures, and the lesser known ones, which interact with each other 24/7 to ensure that the cell can live and, in most cases, duplicate itself.
After this little introductory hat on the cell, I will briefly explain what you will find in the coming months: each post will deal with a specific topic, which may be a specific cellular component (nucleus, mitochondria, …) or a cellular function (DNA replication, antiviral activity, protein production, …), explained trying to create similarities with the life of a metropolis as we know it.
I hope you find it interesting and useful.
