Jelly Cells

An interactive soft-body simulation of five cells: a budding yeast, a red blood cell, a fibroblast, a microglial cell and a neuron. Each one behaves like a block of jelly. You can grab it, pull it, twist it and cut it with a knife to see its organelles in cross-section.

Open Jelly Cells (needs a browser with WebGPU: recent Chrome, Edge or Safari)

What you can do

Grab and pull any part of the cell, and set how firm and how damped it is.
Cut it with the knife. A readout tells you which organelles the cut went through and how big they are.
Move through stages with a slider: the yeast cell cycle, microglial activation, a neuron’s response to axon injury, red blood cell shape changes, and a fibroblast’s wound response.
Click a label to learn the real size and role of each structure, with a link to Wikipedia.
Switch to the Deformation view to see where the cell is stretched or squeezed.

The science

The cells are built from simple shapes, drawn at their real sizes, with bio-plausible anatomy. The mechanics are illustrative: each cell moves as if it were a few centimetres of gelatin, because at true size a cell is far too small and too viscous to visibly wobble.

Source code: github.com/feldaher/jelly-cells