Mycoplasma mycoides and More
Just a reminder that David Goodsell, perhaps the best cellular illustrator working today (I’m willing to bet his art has graced your Tumblr dashboard or Facebook wall) has a full gallery and website, featuring explanations and detailed labels for each cell and its parts.
Oh, and he has a book, The Machinery of Life.
The cell above is Mycoplasma mycoides, the tiny bacterium whose one million base-pair genome was famously created synthetically and implanted into another cell by Craig Venter’s team in 2010.
His work is a really beautiful reminder that cells are more than bags of water with a few organelles, like so many textbooks want you to believe. They are crowded, intricate, highly organized bags of goo filled with odd little blobs doing very complicated stuff.
Source: mgl.scripps.edu
