← 🏭 Medicine & Biophysics

🏭 Unfolded Protein Response and ER Stress Simulator

Cell Fate:
Misfolded Count:
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🏭 Unfolded Protein Response and ER Stress Simulator

The simulation shows misfolded proteins accumulating inside a virtual ER until IRE1, PERK, and ATF6 sensors activate, letting you control stress load to see the transition from adaptive recovery to apoptotic shutdown.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

The simulation shows misfolded proteins accumulating inside a virtual ER until IRE1, PERK, and ATF6 sensors activate, letting you control stress load to see the transition from adaptive recovery to apoptotic shutdown.

🎮 How to Use

Increase the misfolded protein load slider to stress the virtual ER and watch each sensor pathway light up in sequence, then push stress past the recovery threshold to trigger the switch into the apoptotic response.

💡 Did You Know?

IRE1 activates a form of mRNA splicing that happens entirely outside the nucleus in the cytoplasm, a discovery that revealed a completely novel mechanism of gene regulation controlled directly by stress inside an organelle.