Everyone knows that cars require fuel, or energy, to move and get people from one destination to another. How much fuel the car will need though is dependent on a multitude of factors. Cars consume fuel based on the design of the car\u2019s engine and body, but the environment outside of the car also influences fuel consumption, like terrain, wind, temperature, and road conditions.<\/p>\n
Like cars, cells need to metabolize energy to move. And how a cell metabolizes its fuel, adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, is determined by environmental factors outside of the cell. But how much energy they consume to generate movement has never been studied in detail because measuring the metabolic activity of a single cell is extremely difficult to accomplish.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody buys a car by just looking under the hood\u2014you buy it by the overall specs of the car like size, mpg (miles per gallon), etc. And when we look around there is very little measurement of performance factors like mpg for cells,\u201d said Sean Sun<\/a><\/span>, INBT core faculty member and professor of mechanical engineering.<\/p>\n While cells are not mechanical machines they share similar behaviors. Therefore knowing what a cell needs to generate forces and perform mechanical functions can help to understand cell movement.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of biological research is taking a car apart\u2014naming the parts and deciphering what each part does,\u201d said Sun. So rather than studying the activity as individual parts inside a cell, Sun and his colleagues want to know what determines the overall mpg of cell movement, and what external factors influence cell movement energetic requirements using the framework of energy balance and computational modeling.<\/p>\n