CellTour · a mode
TenTimes
Proteins are small in a way that is hard to picture. So go down in steps you can picture: each thing below is about ten times smaller than the one above it. Each bar holds about ten of the next thing, side by side.
Toy model A simplified picture to show one idea. Not a measurement, and not a prediction. Of scale: typical sizes rounded to steps of about ten; real things vary.
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A child's hand, across the palm · about 10 cm
About 10 × a garden pea would fit across.
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A garden pea · about 1 cm
About 10 × a pinhead would fit across.
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A pinhead · about 1 mm
About 10 × a human egg cell, one of the few cells you can just see would fit across.
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A human egg cell, one of the few cells you can just see · about 0.1 mm
About 13 × a red blood cell would fit across.
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A red blood cell · about 8 micrometres (µm)
About 8 × an e. coli bacterium, across its width would fit across.
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An E. coli bacterium, across its width · about 1 µm
About 10 × a flu virus would fit across.
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A flu virus · about 100 nanometres (nm)
About 10 × an antibody, a y-shaped protein would fit across.
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An antibody, a Y-shaped protein · about 10 nm
About 5 × the width of dna's double helix would fit across.
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The width of DNA's double helix · about 2 nm
About 13 × a single carbon atom would fit across.
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A single carbon atom · about 0.15 nm
Where the proteins are
An antibody is about 10 nm across, and a typical protein a few nanometres. The structures on Fold Commons show where each atom of a protein sits, one or two tenths of a nanometre apart: three steps below a flu virus, seven below a pinhead.
Sizes: Milo & Phillips, Cell Biology by the Numbers (how big are cells, viruses and the average protein), and textbook values for DNA's width and a carbon atom.