2025-07-10
38 分钟If you could step inside one of your body's cells,
you'd be amazed at the sheer amount of activity going on inside.
Glucose molecules are being torn apart to release energy.
Snippets of RNA zoom around, carrying messages from one part of the cell to the other.
Jostling between everything else, water molecules buzz around,
powering and enabling chemical reactions.
DNA, the master blueprint for your body, sits coiled up inside the centre of the cell, its nucleus.
Tiny blobs, lysosomes, float around tidying up by looking for any junk or detritus to eat.
And then there's the ribosomes.
These molecular machines take the information written on a cell's DNA and like a factory churning out...
endless widgets of all shapes and sizes, they turn that code into proteins.
The chemistry of life depends on proteins.
These long complex molecules, built from chains of smaller units called amino acids,
emerge from ribosomes as long floppy chains.
Once released into the water inside a cell though,
those chains fold and coil into precise three-dimensional shapes.
A protein's shape is critical for its function.
Some proteins become muscles, bones and skin.
Others carry oxygen in the blood or get used as hormones or antibodies.
Yet more become enzymes,