Goodsell’s Watercolor Paintings of Cellular Beauty

Love the 50Y parties with Goodsell watercolors of cellular substructure everywhere. I loved his book, and tried to buy his ATP flagellar motor, but alas, Seth and Ela bought it and his most recent 7 paintings already!

This was Gen’s favorite… and then I pointed it out that it was Coronavirus “This illustration shows a cross section through a cell infected with a coronavirus such as SARS-CoV-2. It shows a time point when the virus is actively replicating, and new viruses are being created. The cell’s molecules are shown in blues and greens, and the viral molecules are shown in pinks and purples. The painting shows one of the big mysteries of the coronavirus life cycle. The endoplasmic reticulum is extensively remodeled to form vesicles with two concentric membranes. The outer membrane is thought to be connected to the ER, but the inner membrane is thought to be sealed shut. The vesicle is thought to include viral RNA, some of which may be in double-stranded form. The function of these vesicles is still a subject of study, with many questions to be answered. Is the RNA replicating inside? If so, how do the building blocks get into the vesicle, and how does the final product get out?”

The molecular landscape on the left is Myelin: “This painting shows a cross-section through the internode region of a myelinated axon in the central nervous system. The axon is shown at the bottom, with the membrane in green, the cytoplasm and cytoskeleton in blue, and a mitochondrion in purple and magenta. The oligodendrocyte wraps multiple times around the axon, shown with the membrane and membrane-bound proteins in yellow and the cytoplasm and cytoskeleton in orange. A small region of connective tissue is shown at the top in red.”

And some context: “Nerve cells face a challenging problem: cells are small, but the human body is large. The nervous system needs to communicate over long distances, but using small parts. Nerve cells solve this problem by sending signals down long, thin axons, some over a meter in length but only a few microns across. These delicate axons are often surrounded by a sheath of myelin, which protects and strengthens them and also creates a narrow, insulated space that rapidly propagates signals along the axon.

Myelin is formed by specialized cells that wrap themselves around and around the axon. In the central nervous system, oligodendrocytes reach out with tendrils to several neighboring axons and form these amazing structures.”