Cells & Energy
What happens inside a single cell: DNA read into protein, fuel turned into ATP by glycolysis and the mitochondria, the cell cycle dividing and the ways it goes wrong. Alongside them run the housekeeping mechanisms — DNA repair, protein folding, methylation, autophagy and programmed cell death.
Every page here is a hands-on animated diagram, not a video — press play, slow it down, break the mechanism on purpose, and read the live values in real clinical units. They explain how a process works; they are not medical advice, and the evidence for any treatment lives on the topic pages each animation links into.
Table of Contents
The Animations (21)
Meiosis: Making Eggs & Sperm
Halve the chromosome count to build eggs and sperm, shuffle them with crossing-over and independent assortment for millions of combinations — then trigger nondisjunction and watch an aneuploid gamete form.
Launch animation →Mitochondria & ATP
Watch electrons flow through the electron transport chain, protons get pumped, and the ATP-synthase motor spin as your cells make energy — then block Complex IV with cyanide and see the whole chain stall.
Launch animation →Free Radicals & Your Antioxidant Network
Follow one superoxide radical down the whole relay — SOD, catalase, glutathione, vitamin E, vitamin C, NADPH. Then release free iron and watch the Fenton reaction tear a membrane apart.
Launch animation →DNA → Protein
Unzip DNA in the nucleus, transcribe it into mRNA, then step codon by codon as the ribosome matches tRNA anticodons and links amino acids into a protein.
Launch animation →How Proteins Fold — and Misfold in Disease
Watch a chaperone help a new protein fold into its working shape — then take it away and see it clump into the aggregates behind Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, or a prion convert its neighbours.
Launch animation →Autophagy: How Fasting Cleans Out Your Cells
Watch a cell wrap up its damaged parts, digest them in the lysosome and recycle the pieces — idle when you’re fed, ramping up when you fast, and failing when junk piles into disease.
Launch animation →The Methylation Cycle
Hand a methyl group from folate to B12 to homocysteine and back — then knock out B12 and watch the folate trap slam shut while homocysteine climbs.
Launch animation →The Cell Cycle & How Cancer Hijacks It
Turn the cell-division cycle through its four phases and its checkpoints — then damage the DNA and watch p53 halt it, or knock out the brakes and jam the accelerator and watch a tumour grow.
Launch animation →The Sodium–Potassium Pump
Run the pump that gives every cell its voltage — three sodium out, two potassium in, on Mg-ATP. Then drop the magnesium and see exactly why low potassium refuses to correct.
Launch animation →Lactate, the Cori Cycle & the Muscle-Burn Myth
Sprint until lactate floods your blood, then follow it to the liver to be rebuilt into glucose and sent back — and finally bury the myth that lactic acid causes the burn or next-day soreness.
Launch animation →CRISPR: How Gene Editing Works
Program a guide RNA, watch Cas9 hunt down its 20-letter match and cut both DNA strands — then let the cell's repair machinery knock a gene out or paste a healthy one in.
Launch animation →Apoptosis: Your Cells’ Programmed Self-Destruct
Watch a damaged cell trigger its own tidy self-destruct with caspases — then see cancer block the death switch so bad cells survive, or too much of it kill healthy neurons.
Launch animation →How Genes Are Switched On & Off
Dock transcription factors on a promoter and watch RNA polymerase read the gene — then add a repressor, methylate the DNA, or send in a hormone and watch the same gene fall silent or roar back.
Launch animation →Enzymes: How They Speed Up Life
Drop a substrate into an enzyme's active site and watch induced-fit catalysis fly over the activation-energy hill — then heat it, swing the pH, or add a competitive inhibitor and watch the reaction stall.
Launch animation →Getting In and Out of a Cell: Membrane Transport
See every way things cross a cell membrane — oxygen slipping through, water following salt, channels and carriers ferrying downhill, and pumps hauling uphill on ATP — the one framework behind nerves, kidneys and drugs.
Launch animation →Inheritance: Dominant, Recessive & Punnett Squares
Cross two parents and watch their alleles sort into a Punnett square — flip dominance and carrier status to see why two brown-eyed parents can still have a blue-eyed child.
Launch animation →Mitosis: How One Cell Becomes Two
Watch a single cell condense its chromosomes, line them up on the spindle, and split into two identical daughters — then force a mis-segregation and see how a cell ends up with an extra or missing chromosome.
Launch animation →From Sugar to Energy: Glycolysis & the Krebs Cycle
Split one glucose into two pyruvate through ten enzyme steps, feed them into the Krebs cycle, and load the NADH and FADH₂ carriers the mitochondria turn into ATP — then cut the oxygen and watch it fall back to lactate.
Launch animation →How Your DNA Is Repaired — and Why It Fails in Cancer
Send a repair crew down the DNA to snip out UV damage, fix copy errors, and mend double-strand breaks with BRCA — then switch the crew off and watch mutations lock in and cancer risk climb.
Launch animation →How Cancer Spreads (Metastasis)
Follow one tumour cell as it loses its grip, invades a blood vessel, survives the bloodstream and seeds a distant organ — the exact cascade, checkpoint by checkpoint, that makes cancer deadly.
Launch animation →Telomeres: Why Cells Grow Old
Watch chromosome caps shorten with every cell division until the cell retires — the built-in anti-cancer clock — then see cancer switch telomerase back on to become immortal.
Launch animation →