3.1.17. Part 2: Ultrasound and Coherent Transport in Cells

Summary: The text discusses the concept of metabolism within cells, explaining how it involves chemical reactions and the transport of materials. It highlights the difference in metabolism between young and older individuals, as well as during tissue repair. The text also explores the effect of ultrasound on cells, demonstrating how it can induce coherent motion by gently vibrating particles within the cell.

So before we talked about energy, now we'll talk about transport. And the question we'll ask is, can ultrasound induce coherent transport in cells? What do I mean by this? In fact, each cell, each second, there are millions of chemical reactions happening at the same time. It's an enormous huge universe of where individual atoms are packed together in molecules. Molecules are packed together to create bigger molecules like proteins. And out of these proteins, the cell is building the scaffolding, it's building internal all the different parts of the cell. The sum total of this process called metabolism. Now it's the transformation of some raw material into the end product. So all of this together called metabolism. Now in a healthy cell or if you think about a young person, a child, they will have very fast metabolism. So the kids they're running on a street, they're always hungry because metabolism in their cells works so fast. It's burning wherever they're eating so fast and they need more food, they need more substance. but if you talk about, let's say, an older person or maybe somebody who is very ill, especially if it's a chronic condition, then the metabolism start to slow down. All of these processes of so-called enzymatic metabolism start to slow down. And if you think about it in terms of transport, instead of having this constant flow of materials all across the cell, you would have the stagnant pools when the materials are building up in one part, they're not going to the other parts. We have toxins accumulating inside the cell. You have this materials from the previous part of the cells that accumulating inside the cell and so on. So the metabolism start to slow it down. The same happens when the tissue is rebuilding itself. If you think about a wound and suddenly you need to to build 50,000 or 50 million of new cells, your metabolism must increase. What will happen if we add ultrasound into this cesspool of immovable objects and all this very slow metabolism cell. And the ultrasound, as you can see them at the bottom, ultrasound is pretty much very simply a mechanical pressure wave. It's a train that goes through the tissue of high density and the low density zones. So as ultrasound goes through the tissue, what you will see is that all the particles will start to vibrate, but very, very gently, very gently. So what will happen is something like this. So this is an experiment. They put these small green beads in a very microscopic channel. And then they applied external ultrasound to this microscopic channel. And what you see here is that these green beads start to move across the green channel because as ultrasound goes through the channel, it will start push very gently those small particles. So what we create effectively with ultrasound is some sort of a coherent motion. And what is ultrasound? Ultrasound is a coherent pressure wave that goes through living cells.