Always walking with happiness hormons to help if you are down
"But I would walk 500 miles
And I would walk 500 more
Just to be the protein who walks a thousand miles
To deliver cargo to your core" ♫
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
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This animation was made by the Shenandoah Baptist Church and is famously misleading. The “steps” are the stochastic product of Brownian motion. Here’s an accurate representation:
Whoa, does that mean they cool the cell as they walk? They are transferring energy from the Brownian motion which on average would result in a lower temperature in the surrounding particles.
So its the same but drunk?
Most motor proteins use brownian motion (the random vibration of particles) to "move" and make other actions, but you rarely see any rendering showing what it looks like in real-time because it's too fast and wiggly. All of these mechanical "clockwork" animations are super-slowed and clarified for better understanding.
There are hundreds of variations of this animation out there which are very similar, some made by major science organizations, so while you're right that it's not "true to life" it's the standard, acceptable model, and not entirely a product of a church. Although I've seen plenty of creation-science groups use all kinds of biomechanical motor motion to justify creationism, so it's hardly matters. They will believe what they want and interpret what they want no mater what.
I teach cell biology. This is not an acceptable model. Kinesins don't lift their feet to walk. This is a Disney version of the mechanism.
How is it more accurate? I thought that in reality the "steps" are incredibly fast, but that makes it seem like it's a much slower and more uncertain process.
Fast relative to what? The point is that the kinesin protein doesn’t “walk” any more than floating debris “swims.”
Relative to the speed shown in the visualizations. The pop-sci animations look like it takes one step every second or so, while in reality they do hundreds per second.
And they stop, pause, and can go backwards.
I vote for the Baptists!!!! Yours sucks.
Well you can tell by my bind to tubulin
This motor protein ain't stoppin'
Walkin' the line from A to B
Replenishing the ATP
WHY would they not sync the step with the beat 😩
Because they probably don't understand even basic music theory. Unfortunately far too many people don't.
Anyone have the variant with the pimp hat and cane twirling?
This made my day, thank you.
Why no Johnny Cash?
Also delivering unhappiness hormone
Kinesin doesn't discriminate
You have to imagine him enjoying himself.
Imagine if that protein suddenly gained conciousness and decides to meditate to gain higher spiritual awakening instead of transporting hormones.
Then a friendly little chaperone protein would come and beat the living shit out of it until it folded itself again and stopped meditating, back to work :)
A pimps love is very different from that of a square.
Better than being ubiquitinized, I guess.
But the proteins long for the mines
Body horror, gore
Guess you've never seen the TV show "Another Life"
Do they move this slowly? Or is this animation in bullet time?
This animation isn't just sped up, it's also simplified. In reality they don't take steady, purposeful steps. They spaz out with random vibrations (Brownian motion) until the "foot" clicks into place by random chance, then the other one releases and the process repeats. It's like shaking a container filled with legos until they assemble themselves. The proteins are just shaped in such a way that "walking" is the most probable outcome.
The animation is actually slowed down. Kinesin can take something like 100 steps per second. Each step is about 8 nm, and they've been observed to move 600-1000 nm per second.
In reality it wiggles around in Brownian motion but the equilibrium of it "clicking" into place is so attractive that it keeps happening really fast.
IIRC it's like 10.000 times faster (I can be wrong but then it's probably way faster).
I guess this depends on environmental conditions such as
- temperature
- acidity of the internal cell environment
- how available is energy? My guess this mechanism is powered by ATP?
The real Sisyphos
When you walkin'
When you walkin'
We always keep moving forward. No matter what.
Is this the protein equivalent of the sole Tiananmen square protester ?
Depending on your mood
The Strongest Shape
Making my way downtown