Plant Cell: Animal Cell:
- Using your sketches and the photos you took of your plant and animal cells, explain:
- What do animal cells look like under the microscope? What cell structures are visible? Animal cells look like small circles under the microscope. 2 cells are overlapping each other, so it looks like an egg. I can see the nucleus in the middle of both cells, ribosomes and the cell membrane.
- What do plant cells look like under the microscope? What cell structures are visible? Plant cells look like streams of rectangular blobs close to each other. I could see a small nucleus in the biggest purple blob under the microscope, and the cell wall.
- How can you tell plant cells and animal cells apart (if you only see them under the microscope)? Plant cells have multiple of them very close to each other, but animal cells are not very close together, maybe overlapping, and animal cells don’t have multiple of them in one place, maybe 1 or 2. Plant cells are more rectangular than animal 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? The methylene blue stains the cell and makes structures more visible. Otherwise the cell is almost transparent under the microscope. Because the onion skin already has colour, purple. plant cells does not need the methylene blue. - Reflection:
What did you learn while doing this lab? I learned more about the microscope, such as the fine adjustment knob and the knobs that moves the stage up and down. And that you don’t see a lot of things in the cells even with the highest lens.
What questions arose while doing this lab? What are you curious about? I wonder what you have to do to see all the structures of the cells, like the text book drawing. And why the plant cells and animals cells look so different, the shapes, how they are not close together and how there is different number of cells.
