[abrogard]

 Yes. Thanks.

 A bit remiss of me. I should have thought more. As usual.

 I was thinking of the glucose as coming from 'the wilds of nature' so to speak and then entering the ordered controlled environment of the cell.

 But of course it wasn't formed in the 'wilds' but was formed in the cells of a plant.

 'stamped out' from a template.

How does it manage to maintain its shape once that's happened?

Do a large percentage of these molecules get changed, distorted, destroyed and just a percentage retain their integrity long enough to pass into the next 'procedure' ?

[Arkcon]

And a quote "..when a glucose molecule enters the cell phosphorylation is immediate.."   But I've been led to believe the cell is a crowded area. Very crowded. Totally crowded.

 How can phosphor groups find the glucose molecule 'immediately' ?

You have to consider critically the issues of scale.  Molecules are very tiny, they're about as small as you can get and still be a "real thing".  There's no "crowd" of cellular organelles keeping molecules apart.

Similar thought when I think of tiny pills ingested by us that effect the whole organism, the whole 200lb of meat or whatever.  How can that tiny amount of chemical spread throughout the organism so quickly, permeate everywhere?

They generally don't.  They act on a specific part, that in turn effects the entire organism.  For example, cardiac medicine works of specific nerves of specific systems, altering feedback for the circulatory system, and that affects the entire organism.  Although, a half a gram of antibiotic does in fact end up circulating for a while, but that has an actual affect of making the body fluids hostile to microbe invaders.

 

My understanding of the molecular, atomic world is miniscule. It only started a couple of weeks ago.

 And as I say, I'm not formally a student.

 So if you find my questions, observations, understandings annoyingly obtuse, immature, ignorant then please ignore them... I don't mean to pollute the waters...

Keep trying, we're here to help.  Try to read some of Issac Asimov's non-fiction books.  He can spend a chapter building on topics, just to make one point.  Its a good way to learn not only the topic, but to have a respect for the complex interconnectedness science requires. 

[abrogard]

I'll look for some Asimov.  I used to read his SciFi stuff but I've never read anything else of his.

Perhaps I misunderstood David Goodsell's depiction of the blood at 2:10min within Drew Berry's 'animations of unseeable biology' at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFCvkkDSfIU

That red blood cell looks like a sunflower head, doesn't it? One can imagine them all jostling together, those haemoglobin molecules, but it's hard to see things moving freely through that space to find a target.

Actually I emailed Drew and queried the scientific precision of his animations and he assured me they were very exact and told me (if I remember right.. damned if I can find the emails now..) that the cells were indeed very crowded and he'd made space in them in his animations for the sake of clarity.

That's when I first wondered how anything could reliably get done with such congestion. 

Naturally it is quite clear that things do get done...

[Babcock_Hall]

Your description of the cell is not unreasonable.  In the red blood cell hemoglobin is so concentrated that it is almost ready to crystallize.  Cells are not infrequently described as crowded:  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18096846  Yet enzymes are remarkably good catalysts in spite of any problems relating to diffusion.

[abrogard]

Thanks for that. Yes, an interesting article I imagine:

. a thorough understanding of the material properties of intracellular fluids, and hence transport properties within the cell, is mandatory.

 unfortunately I can't justify $35 for every interesting abstract that comes my way...

 it's gotta be free science for me...

 

[Babcock_Hall]

You can do a search at Pubmed on crowding and look for articles that say something like "free in Pubmed Central."  Or you can use "free full text available" as a search filter.  For example:  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23511479

[abrogard]

 Well thanks for that, very kind of you. I hadn't known that and had just about written off that resource as being of no practical use to me.

 You've made it available again.  Thank you.