What I find fascinating is the extreme efficiency of what is effectively an electric motor, reaching nearly 100% efficiency. At human scale we struggle with heat dissipation and friction
Article stopped exactly where stuff got interesting.
This whole "protons entering bacterium and being pumped out" is exactly the ancestor of the mitochondria, that's what it does, except now the "outside" is the inside of the parent cell.
This reminds me of a gem of a comment from about a month back, about a dead simple Russian guidance system from a Cold War-era missile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389285
For those who remember, the flagellum was a major site of the Intelligent Design debate that gave us Christopher Rufo (via the Discovery Institute)
The general idea was that there were specific examples of "irreducible complexity" that proved that there was an intelligent designer. The project on the part of certain Christian political factions was to add a veneer of hypothesis testing to creationism. The god of the gaps retreats further
The article states that the rotor very much evolved. But if you follow the linked evidence, various flagellar motors appear to have evolved from an original ancestor. This is exactly consistent with intelligent design and creationism. It does not demonstrate the origin of the flagellar motor in the first place. Everyone, whether creationists, theistic evolutionists, or materialistic evolutionists all agree that mutation, natural selection, genetic drift, gene flow etcetera occur. This paper advances the debate about origins no further distance. The debate is not about the survival of the "fittest", the debate is about the arrival of the fittest.
Interesting that humans and bacteria both use an electrochemical gradient to produce energy but in different ways. In humans, this happens in our mitochondria, but in bacteria this occurs across their cytoplasmic membrane. Would you agree this is a result of evolution?
Protons are also called "hydrogen ions." Stuff that donates protons is called an "acid." So this is an acid chemical process but I'm not enough of a chemist to know more than that. Would welcome comments from someone who is.
Beautifully written. This doesn’t just explain the flagellar motor — it feels like watching the very “life force” behind biology running on protons and entropy. Amazing how much of life boils down to such elegant physics.
I have always been super annoyed by the abstraction that ATP is a magical tiny battery that transports "energy" in some nonspecific way and that cells just hand-wave absorb that magic energy.
I learned recently that the actual mechanism of the energy transfer is one of the most interesting parts of molecular biology.
ATP doesn't just store chemical energy. ATP synthase constructs the molecules by literally mashing the two halves together and mechanically twisting them. ATP can later slot into proteins, releasing that energy by mechanically moving parts of a molecular machine. It can also be split for simple heat and participate in other chemical reactions more directly.
But I find it absolutely fascinating that ATP operates as a mechanical battery. Storing actual mechanical motion in a chemical bond that can be reversed to recover the motion and transform it into work. Molecular machines are one of the most incredible things in the universe.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 34.1 ms ] threadthere's a good richard feynam video about how things feel when they're that small https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eRCygdW--c
This whole "protons entering bacterium and being pumped out" is exactly the ancestor of the mitochondria, that's what it does, except now the "outside" is the inside of the parent cell.
Actually, someone even commented in that thread about how it was similar to biological mechanisms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390619
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/educationalgifs/comments/17squg1/ho...
Also can work as atp generator by applying rotation ?
The general idea was that there were specific examples of "irreducible complexity" that proved that there was an intelligent designer. The project on the part of certain Christian political factions was to add a veneer of hypothesis testing to creationism. The god of the gaps retreats further
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKe3UgH1AKg
I learned recently that the actual mechanism of the energy transfer is one of the most interesting parts of molecular biology.
ATP doesn't just store chemical energy. ATP synthase constructs the molecules by literally mashing the two halves together and mechanically twisting them. ATP can later slot into proteins, releasing that energy by mechanically moving parts of a molecular machine. It can also be split for simple heat and participate in other chemical reactions more directly.
But I find it absolutely fascinating that ATP operates as a mechanical battery. Storing actual mechanical motion in a chemical bond that can be reversed to recover the motion and transform it into work. Molecular machines are one of the most incredible things in the universe.