What do animal cells look like under the microscope? (image 2) What cell structures are visible?

  • Animal cells look like little splotches of liquid. They are not perfectly round, they can be flipped or folded into different shapes, one of the ones in our picture looks like a bird . When they lay fat they look like eggs, with the yolk in the middle
  • You can see the cell membrane and the nucleus clearly, there may be other organelles but it’s too small to distinguish

What do plant cells look like under the microscope? (image 1) What cell structures are visible?

  • You can see multiple layers/sheets of cells; the first sheet/layer looks like outlines of water droplets, they are more rectangular than the animal cell but still have a slight rounded shape. In the second layer/sheet the cells are more spread apart and have a purple tint to them, they are even more rectangular than the first layer, each layer seems to be facing different directions.
  • From what I can see, only the cell wall and the cell membrane are visible

How can you tell the animal cells apart from the plant cells (under a microscope)

  • Plant cells have 2 walls (cell membrane and cell wall) and they are more rectangular
  • Animal cells looks much thinner, you can clearly see the nucleus, they can fold into different shapes but are mainly round-ish, animal cells seem to clump together more than plant cells

We used methylene blue on the animal cell. Why was it important to treat animal cells with this compound? Why didn’t we use it on the plant cells?

  • Because of its affinity for DNA and RNA, methylene blue will produce a darker stain in areas where those components are present. In the case of the human cheek cell, methylene blue causes the DNA in the nucleus to stand out so that the nucleus can clearly been seen in a light microscope.
  • I think we didn’t use methylene blue on the plant cells because there were more cells in one part of the onion than the little swab of the cheek. Plant cells are also thicker and easier to see so there is no reason to stain it.

What did you learn while doing this lab?

  • There are multiple layers of cells when looking at a piece of onion, and each layer looks different.
  • Animal cells are thin so they can fold and rotate to look differently under the microscope instead of if they were laying flat
  • That you have to stain animal cells in order to see them clearly under a microscope

What are some questions that came up during the lab?

  • What does a plant and animal cell look like when you can see all the organelles? (under the microscope)
  • What power does it take/what kind of microscope do you need to be able to see all the organelles?