Biology is a Burrito: A text- and visual-based journey through a living cell

The painting is wonderful. Yes, it's a snapshot in time of a dynamic state. All paintings are!

One of the most fascinating parts to me was DNA transcription. The engineering is quite precise.

Found the video I was referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY

> The first time I did these calculations, I felt an intense appreciation for biology. And now, I want everyone else to feel the same. We ought to teach students of biology to think as mathematicians: to carefully quantify biology, to think in absolute units, and to develop a feeling for the organism.

It was interesting to read this article, but I think I would’ve understood a lot more if this entire piece had been (or were) an animated video that described it. Text and a few animations don’t do enough justice for the passion, knowledge and detail that’s in this article, IMO.

Bit nitpicky here but ... he wrote a typical E. coli cell.

Naturally bacteria have different size ranges, depending on many factors - nutrients, temperature, genome and so forth; e. g. look at how huge Thiomargarita namibiensis is.

But the 1 µm as average here given for E. coli, is not correct:

https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?id=117344&...

Length 1.78±0.54 μm

So while +/- at the lower end may be 1.24 µm, the max range here would be 2.42 µm, which is what I had more in mind (e. g. roughly about 2µm). I don't have all of the data to be able to say which is the exact value, but I think the website at bionumbers.hms.harvard.ed is more realistic, so I would say that E. coli's best average is more at 2µm than 1µm.