Children's Museum Science Lab

Children's Museum Science Lab

Making CELLS

CELLS: BUILDING BLOCKS OF LIFE

April 2nd, 2013

John giving the lecture on cells

Below we are building an animal or human cell.  A cell is a jelly like fluid, called a cytoplasm, surrounded by a membrane. 

cell with a nucleus


  A cell is a jelly like fluid, called a cytoplasm, surrounded by a membrane.  The membrane lets good stuff in and keeps bad stuff out.   Floating around in the cytoplasm are the organelles doing their jobs: a nucleus, E.R., ribosomes, Golgi bodies, mitochondria.  The organelles work hard, making protein, turn food into energy, and get waste out.
 

A cell has lysosomes and peroxysomes.  Plants and animals, are made of eukaryotic cells, which means that their generic material is surrounded by a membrane.  Together the genes and the membrane form an organelle called the nucleus.  The other type of cell, prokaryotic, has no nucleus.  Genetic information in prokaryotic cells just sort of float free in the cytoplasm.

Most prokaryotes are single-celled bacteria, like Lactobacillus acidophilus, which is used to make yogurt.  In any different organism, different cells carry out very different specialized functions.  As a result they can look very different.  Cells can be star shaped-bone cell; muscle cells can be stretchy, and nerve cells can be really long.

Other cells like bacteria have little hairs growing out of it to help it move around, and red-blood cells are shaped like little bowls, and plant cells have a rigid cell wall that help them to maintain their shape.  

Inside the human body cells can vary in size from being microscopic to over a meter long.  We have about 75 trillion cells in each of our bodies, that is enough to stretch around the planet 47 times!!

Below, the cell shape has been changed from a circle into a rectangle, to help it become a plant cell.

 Then we turned the animal/human cell into a plant cell by adding vacuoles and chloroplasts organelles.

(If you want to know where I got the wording for my cell descriptions, I edited a cartoon on "Cells"; from a "BrainPop" cartoon.)

 

The finished product; ready to be hanged up as a decoration! (once the clay dries, of course!)

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