| Home | Cells, Or What is Life?Scientists Lynn Margulis and Brig Klyce have quick answers: "Life is cells." --Brig Klyce Well, I guess they solved that question in a hurry? But what is a cell? Aren’t they those itty-bitty little things in our bodies? Well, not all our cells are itty-bitty. A nerve cell can be a couple of feet long. This allows it to send messages along its path more quickly to distant spots in your body, for instance if you want to wiggle your toes. A 2-pound ostrich egg is also a single cell. But if you like itty-bitty try the bacteria Mycroplasma pneumoniae that causes walking pneumonia. This prokaryote cell weighs 1/10 of a trillionth of a gram. Virologist Richard Herrmann defines it as a minimal cell. It has no cell wall and only 687 genes. M. Pneumoniae can make you pretty sick because it reproduces itself over and over so quickly. It has all necessary machinery and encoded instructions for self-reproduction. Because Prokaryote cells (also called bacteria) are so simple with shorter genetic instructions, they can replicate more than 10 times as fast as the eukaryotic cells of plants and animals. If you have ever been sick with a viral infection, you may have a hard time believing that a virus is technically not alive. This is because it cannot reproduce by itself. It needs to infect your nice healthy cells to get its machinery for reproduction. This also what makes it so nasty because it is making your healthy cells sick. All this may sound simplistic to a biologist or a medical person, but the bulk of us are neither. If you would like to dig into cellular biology a little further, try this Life Science page at BeyondBooks.com. This site is for high school biology students and I actually found it informative and a lot of fun. |