With grateful thanks to the source of this wonderful photo for sharing it on creative commons licence Single-celled organisms like this paramecium, if you look at them down a microscope they look just like the diagrams. The whole structure is laid out transparently for you to see. This is amazing to me because I usually think of diagrams as simplifications of what's actually there. But in the case of these very lively little creatures, what's there is marvellously simple. And if they're alive when you're looking at them, you are struck by how very fast their movements are. All those cilia, orchestrated in an elegant Mexican wave every few milliseconds. Cilia are made of an arrangement of tiny tubules linked together by dynein protein molecules. Whenever one of these protein molecules is able to gain energy from ATP molecules floating around in the cell, it changes shape, bends on itself and crawls up one of the microtubules. This bends the whole cilium. Because o...
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