If you have ever been taught any biology in school you’ll
have probably learnt about cells, you may even remember that the mitochondria are the ‘power
house’ of the cell. Hopefully however this fact file will help you to learn a
bit more about the building blocks of every single organism on this planet.- Amazingly most of the cells which make up your body aren’t the same organism as you. In fact 95% of the cells which make up a human body are bacteria. The vast majority of these cells are found within the digestive tract and are about ten times smaller than human cells. This is important as although lots of people know a lot of the body is made up of bacteria the overall mass of them isn’t larger than the mass of the fewer human cells.
- Even individual cells in an animal are not of the same origin so to speak. There are in fact two different of DNA found within the cell. There is the DNA found in the nucleus DNA which is a combination of parental DNA while the before mentioned mitochondrial DNA is only maternal DNA. This is due to the fact that in the fertilisation process the mother provides the egg (first cell) which contains all the organelles.
- The largest cell in the human body is the female gamete (egg) and this is about 1mm in diameter. This however is tiny compared to the largest known single cell organism, there is an aquatic alga called Caulerpa taxiforlia which has been observed to grow to lengths of 30cm, which is completely insane when you think about it.
- Finally I want to talk about Caenorhabditis elegans, or C.elegans, which is a type of nematode (roundworm). This is used as a model species for biological research because of the fact that the exact numbers of cells which make up this organism at different stages of their life cycle are known (959 somatic cells in one sex and 1031 in the other). This has allowed us to learn about cell lineages. If you want find out more about any of these fact I’d suggest you start with this one as you’d be amazed what C. elegans has taught us.
Thanks for reading!
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