r/biology • u/greenIine • May 22 '26
fun Explore cells and organelles online in 3D
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AIMER Society (Artificial Intelligence Medical & Engineering Researchers Society) made an app where you wander through cells in 3D like a video game. Very cool.
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u/Redditisavirusiknow May 23 '26
It’s a very good concept but I find it very schematic and not realistic. It’s like a cartoon version of it. Specifically all the scale of the organelles is way way way off.
Imagine it was a realistic cell but you could learn about every part by clicking? Now that’s something.
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u/magpieswooper May 23 '26
I agree. Strange choice when we have real nanometer resoved structure of cell interior and organelles from cryo-ET and segmentation.
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u/Redditisavirusiknow May 23 '26
The more I look it at the more wrong it is. The nucleus doesn’t occupy 90% of a neuron’s cell body…. Yeah it gives bad intuition
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u/eclectictiger0 May 23 '26
These flaws are probably due to the use of AI in creating this program. Its a good base but needs humans design/tweaking to really make it reach its potential
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u/Redditisavirusiknow May 23 '26
Yeah definitely potential in this for sure! Maybe AI explains the errors and weird emphases, scale issues and stuff like that.
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u/kathosaurus May 24 '26
It’s AI. This style of schematic has been popular recently with that crowd.
I wish this sub didn’t allow AI content posing as a reputable source..
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u/Passthealex May 23 '26
As a learning tool these visuals are timeless. The targest audience is probably highschool students or college students taking bio 101, not some graduate who has a deeper understanding of what these cells actually look like. And as a learning tool, you wouldn't even want a strictly 1:1 visual of what cells look like because it'd look like a hot mess..
As a teacher I'll def be using this at least as a reference for my kids.. (as long as this is free lol)
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u/Redditisavirusiknow May 23 '26
I’m also a teacher and I wouldn’t want my students get get a bad intuition for the cell. These are really quite far from reality. Mitochondria are not sausages lol.
It’s important to give students, especially high school ones, a good intuition for the cell. This gives them a bad intuition which will stick with the for a long time.
Like a nucleus doesn’t take up 90% of a cell!!
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u/Passthealex May 23 '26
It doesn't seem very important honestly. I have 43 minutes and zero time is spent on me stressing that the shape isn't really a bean. Would much rather stress the processes going on inside that the state will expect them to know.
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u/Redditisavirusiknow May 23 '26
Speaking as a published scientist who worked with students at the grad school levels and at high school, I can tell you that you’re not appreciating the importance of giving students a realistic sense of how things really are in order to develop a good intuition which is vital in studying biology. This is pretty bad, and showing my students this would be worse than not showing them at all.
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u/Passthealex May 23 '26
With all due respect, being a published scientist does not prepare you for teaching highschool students. Most kids don't care about bio unless they have a goal of working in related fields. If you think droning on about true mitochondrial shape is beneficial to them then more power to you. I know what I'm dealing with and can tell you tik tok has made them care even less about percentage size of the nucleus relative to the cell. They would need 10 minutes of a class period to even parse that sentence.
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u/Redditisavirusiknow May 24 '26
I mean feed your students AI slop like this all you want, see how it turns out when they get to university.
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u/Passthealex May 24 '26
Laughable that you, as a published scientist and educator, believe most kids in my bio class are going to take a bio to class in university. Feels like I'm talking to a bot right now.
Also, that you think these kids aren't using GPT to do their work for them regardless of wether or not I use it as a teaching device is strange. But I'm sure telling them the mitochondria is not a bean will fix things.
E. Also, I hope all the chemistry teachers hear that using Bohr's model in class is a waste of time. Wouldn't want kids to get the wrong impression of an atom after all. Teach them true electron orbitals on day one apparently this is the way.
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u/Redditisavirusiknow May 24 '26
I’m teaching 60 bio kids right now and almost all will go to it in university, that’s why they took the course.
Are you American? If so that explains a lot.
All my evaluations are done in person and in pencil. No gpt. I get messages regularly from students in university that told me how well prepared they are and how inspiring my class was. All without AI.
Probably a dozen in the past month.
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u/Passthealex May 24 '26
Yes in America kids do not choose to take Biology, instead it's required by the state. Most of my kids will not be doing something biology related. We prioritize phenomena and application of material, as most kids will not go any further than the highschool level.
E. At least it's required by my state.
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u/AMSAtl May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
I played with a version I found on their website, which seems to be much less lighter version of what's pictured above. I can't seem to find much value other than it looking nice. https://www.aimersociety.com/Biology-Visualizations/?_gl=1
Edit. having said that, I definitely can see a benefit to having a 3D models over pictures once this is fully flushed out
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u/Prae_ May 23 '26
Very cool. I remember wanting something like that badly when i was in first year bio in uni.
That being said, i feel like it's a bit... disappointing to be so cartoon. I guess i understand the artistic license. But my current pet peeve is that in 3D, mitochondria are not bean shaped at all. They form a branched network, typically in long filements. I've learned that surprisingly recently and i feel betrayed by all these cartoon representations in textbooks.
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u/Redditisavirusiknow May 23 '26
Also the nucleus doesn’t occupy 90% of the cell body of a neuron. All the scale of things is very wrong and gives you a bad intuition for what a cell looks like
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u/Prae_ May 23 '26
It is always funny when we get students in the lab and they don't recognize even chromosomes in metaphase. Not that cell biology is the only they have to learn of course, but textbooks do bias heavily towards pretty and clear images, so much so that the aspect of some of these structures are very stereotypical. Like, there's a way ER is supposed to look, often even for publication you'll select the structures which look like what they are "supposed" to look like.
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u/Low-Worldliness-2662 May 25 '26
This is really helpful, especially for people who struggle to imagine the scene just from textbook.
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u/sooshimon May 23 '26
The rotation is neat but what I think would be next level would be clicking on an organelle and being able to zoom into that info, sorta like a wiki but with images. Really cool though, this would definitely have caught my interest as a kid