Modern biology textbooks assert that only bacteria can take nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into a form that is usable for life. Plants that fix nitrogen, such as legumes, do so by harboring symbiotic bacteria ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 11, 2024
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3721
The single-celled organism Naegleria fowleri ranks among the deadliest human parasites. Researchers around Matthias Horn and Patrick Arthofer from the Center for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science at the University ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 24, 2024
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47
A component of the human intestinal flora that has been little studied to date is the focus of a new study from Germany. Plasmids are small extrachromosomal genetic elements that frequently occur in bacterial cells and can ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 16, 2024
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104
Cells contain various specialized structures—such as the nucleus, mitochondria or peroxisomes—known as "organelles." Tracing their genesis and determining their structure is fundamental to understanding cell function ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 10, 2024
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124
A new study by researchers from The Chinese University of Hong Kong has reported the emergence of mechanical spiral waves in bacterial matter.
Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder and Princeton University have, for the first time, employed a tool often used in geology to detect the atomic fingerprints of cancer.
Biochemistry
May 6, 2024
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164
Imagine tuning into a football game, but all of the players are invisible except for the two quarterbacks. Without being able to see the orchestrated movements of the full teams, this would be a very confusing game to watch.
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 11, 2024
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65
Observing proteins precisely within cells is extremely important for many branches of research but has been a significant technical challenge—especially in living cells, as the required fluorescent labeling had to be individually ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 19, 2024
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47
Scientists are normally happy to find regularities and correlations in their data—but only if they can explain them. Otherwise, they worry that those patterns might just be revealing some flaw in the data itself, so-called ...
Analytical Chemistry
Apr 18, 2024
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83
In a new study published in Nature Chemistry, UNC-Chapel Hill researcher Ronit Freeman and her colleagues describe the steps they took to manipulate DNA and proteins—essential building blocks of life—to create cells that ...
Biochemistry
Apr 23, 2024
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144
The cell is the structural and functional unit of all known living organisms. It is the smallest unit of an organism that is classified as living, and is often called the building block of life. Some organisms, such as most bacteria, are unicellular (consist of a single cell). Other organisms, such as humans, are multicellular. (Humans have an estimated 100 trillion or 1014 cells; a typical cell size is 10 µm; a typical cell mass is 1 nanogram.) The largest known cell is an unfertilized ostrich egg cell.
In 1835 before the final cell theory was developed, a Czech Jan Evangelista Purkyně observed small "granules" while looking at the plant tissue through a microscope. The cell theory, first developed in 1839 by Matthias Jakob Schleiden and Theodor Schwann, states that all organisms are composed of one or more cells. All cells come from preexisting cells. Vital functions of an organism occur within cells, and all cells contain the hereditary information necessary for regulating cell functions and for transmitting information to the next generation of cells.
The word cell comes from the Latin cellula, meaning, a small room. The descriptive name for the smallest living biological structure was chosen by Robert Hooke in a book he published in 1665 when he compared the cork cells he saw through his microscope to the small rooms monks lived in.
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