On Friday, our science class used a microscope to observe cells. Some animal cells and some plant. Unfortunately, I was absent so I wasn’t able to experience this lab “hands-on”. My solution is to simply search up the cells that I would have been observing. Which were onion cells and cheek cells.
Observations :
What can I observe about the onion cell? Well, I can make out some of the parts of it. Parts like the cell wall and what looks like the vacuole.
In this image of some cells from the inside of the cheek I can see the nucleus on the cells and apparently, the cytoplasm. The nucleus are shown as blue dots in the middle of the cell.
The question is, if I already didn’t know that these cells were plant and animal cells, how would I tell them a part? A good way to do this is to look out for parts that plant cells have, that animal cells do not. For example, cell walls and a chloroplast. There are also parts that animal cells have but plant cells do not. Like the vacuole!
During the lab, a substance called methylene blue was used with the cheek cell. This was used to “stain” the cell. Doing so enhances the cell underneath the microscope. Methylene blue is a stain specifically used to enhance the nucleus in animal cells.
By doing some of this research, I got to find some real-life pictures of cells and not just a drawing in a text book. I also found some ways on how to differentiate animal cells in plant cells. All in all, I think that this lab will be useful later on in our biology unit.