Biologists would love to know exactly what happens inside a cell, but measuring every cellular process simultaneously is impossible. That’s why they turn to simulations, like this one, which tracks how a bacterial cell divides into two. The simulation tries to capture every known part and process of a cell, or, as Zane R. Thornburg puts it, the cell’s “complete molecular context and chemical reaction networks.”
In this video, Thornburg—who is a postdoc at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—Andrew Maytin, and their team in Zaida Luthey-Schulten’s lab show the cell’s ribosomes (yellow and purple), sugar transporters (gray), and chromosome (blue). As the cell approaches division, it produces the DNA of its future daughter cell (red).
While the goal of simulating a real, live cell is ambitious, Thornburg points out that the team started with the simplest example they could think of. The microbe shown here is JCVI-syn3A, the bacterium that has the fewest genes but can still divide and grow. In real life, JCVI-syn3A takes about 2 h to divide, which is a jiffy considering that it takes Thornburg’s computers 4–6 days to produce one of these cartoons.
Credit: Zane R. Thornburg/Andrew Maytin/Zaida Luthey-Schulten/Cell. Read the paper in Cell.
Do science. Take pictures. Win money. Enter our photo contest.
See more Chemistry in Pictures.
CORRECTION
This story was updated on April 13, 2026, to correct the location of Zane R. Thornburg’s university. He is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, not the university’s Chicago campus.
2026 American Chemical Society
