welcome to the guided tour of cellscape a virtual reality Journey inside a human cell for the best experience view this video in a VR headset if you don't have a headset you can watch on YouTube in Google Chrome or in the YouTube app on your mobile phone this project was made possible by the Google making and science team here we are inside of a human cell cells are the building blocks of living things and your body is made up of about 40 trillion of these cells as you can see the cell is a dynamic place there are a lot of different things happening at the same time look around and check out the environment turn to the sides and look all the way behind you tilt your head back and look above you and look down below if the cell actually looked like this you'd be tiny about 100 NM tall which means that about 3,000 of you stacked on top of each other would be about as tall as a grain of sand most of the large structures that you see around you are called organel they're like the body organs of the cell a lot of the smaller things look like they're floating and they kind of are the inside of the cell called the cytoplasm is filled with a jelly-like substance called cytool you'll see areas with lots of small particles floating around many of these particles are proteins you find tons of proteins in cells and they have all sorts of different jobs a cell also spends a lot of its time making new proteins if you tilt your head back and look at the very top of the cell you can sort of see the cell membrane which is like a flexible skin that wraps around the whole cell and separates it from the outside towards the top of the cell you'll also see lots of long chains crisscrossing in the distance these are parts of the cell's cytoskeleton like the bones in your body or the frame of a building the cytoskeleton provides structure for the cell and helps give it shap shape you'll also see some really large oval-shaped structures above you these are organel called mitochondria the mitochondria are often known as the powerhouses or the power plants of the cell and their main job is to take in food and create energy the cell needs to survive pretty much everything in the cell relies on energy created by the mitochondria now let's look at a bunch more of the stuff that's going on here look around until you see two large purple objects in front of you these are the parts of a ribosome which makes protein you'll see a yellow chain float up this is a strand of messenger RNA or mRNA and it carries instructions for how to make a protein the two parts of the ribosome come together around the MRNA follow the ribosome and mRNA as they float to the left and attach to a part of the blue endoplasmic reticulum the ribosome reads the instructions on the MRNA as it moves through and it uses these to build a new protein this is the process C of translation putting together a protein using instructions from mRNA now the protein that just got made we can't see it because it came out of the bottom of the ribosome and got pushed through a hole into the endoplasmic reticulum or ER which is kind of like a massive network of pipes look up and just to the left a little and you'll see a large part of the ER it looks like it's made of blue pulsing tubes after they're made proteins move through the channels of the ER to different locations and many of them end up in the GGI apparatus which you'll see just to the right the GGI apparatus is green and it's making lots of round blobs the GOI is like the post office of the cell it receives proteins from the ER sorts them packages them up and ships them off to their proper destinations proteins get packaged up inside those round blobs which are called vesicles if you look down just a bit you'll see a vesicle which has proteins inside and and it's getting pulled Along by something that looks like feet this is how proteins get transported and delivered around the cell those little feet are proteins called kinin the track they're walking along is a structure called a microt tual follow the vesicle and Canan as they walk along the microtubule let's start the scene again so we can take a better look at the microt tual here the microt tual is being built or assembled from smaller parts that come together watch how they're added to the end this is a process called polymerization the small things are made up of are proteins called tubulin now if you look just under the microt tual that's coming together you'll see one that's coming apart or depolymerizing microtubules aren't permanent they can get taken apart and put together in different locations depending on what the cell needs microtubules are part of the cytoskeleton of the cell if you look down at your feet you're standing right on a section of endoplasmic reticulum you can see a bunch of ribosomes translating a strand of mRNA the orange dots are called translocon pores they're little holes in the ER ribosomes attach to these holes and push newly made proteins right into the ER now look below you way down there you can see the top of the nucleus which is where the DNA is kept you can't actually see the DNA DNA is precious and important so it's kept safe in the nucleus surrounded by a membrane similar to the membrane around the cell itself if a cell needs to use a part of the DNA it makes an RNA copy of it this is the process of transcription then that copy can leave the nucleus and enter the cytoplasm RNA is like a disposable copy of part of the DNA finally you'll see some big objects floating up and towards you these are proteosomes the proteomes are like the cell's G garbage trucks and recycling centers for proteins they grab onto proteins that are no longer needed and they break them down into tiny pieces you can see the pieces being released from the back the cell is an amazingly beautiful place it might look like a foreign landscape but it's literally right inside you thanks for joining us on a tour of cellscape