Cell (biology)
hideThe 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.
For more information about Cell (biology), read the full article at
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News tagged with living cells
Splitting fluorescent protein helps image clusters in live cells
Dec 26, 2009 |
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Half a protein is better than none, and in this case, it's way better than a whole one. A Rice University lab has discovered that dividing a particular fluorescent protein and using it as a tag is handy for analyzing the ...
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Scientists take important step toward the proverbial fountain of youth
Dec 22, 2009 |
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Going back for a second dessert after your holiday meal might not be the best strategy for living a long, cancer-free life say researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. That's because they've shown exactly ...
Bioengineered materials promote the growth of functional vasculature, new study shows
Dec 21, 2009 |
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Regenerative medicine therapies often require the growth of functional, stable blood vessels at the site of an injury. Using synthetic polymers called hydrogels, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology ...
Drug for Multiple Myeloma Demonstrated to Significantly Extend Disease-Free Survival
Dec 21, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Initial results from a large, randomized clinical trial for patients with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow, showed that patients who received the oral drug lenalidomide (Revlimid, also ...
Switchable Nanostructures Made with DNA
Nanotechnology / Bio & Medicine
Dec 21, 2009 |
4.6 / 5 (9) |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have found a new way to use a synthetic form of DNA to control the assembly of nanoparticles — this time resulting ...
Metastasis formation revealed in detail and real time
Dec 20, 2009 |
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Up to 25% of cancer patients develop metastases in the brain - often long after successful treatment of the primary tumor. In almost all such cases, the prognosis is poor. The mechanisms responsible for the appearance of ...
How to Find Signs of Life on Mars
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Dec 18, 2009 |
3.7 / 5 (3) |
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By studying the signatures of fossil life on Earth, geobiologists can get a clue of what to look for when hunting for extraterrestrial life on Mars.
Research project yields better understanding of the defective protein that causes cystic fibrosis
Dec 18, 2009 |
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A team of researchers studying the protein that, when defective or absent, causes cystic fibrosis (CF) has made an important discovery about how that protein is normally controlled and under what circumstances ...
Science's breakthrough of the year: Uncovering 'Ardi'
Dec 17, 2009 |
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The research that brought to light the fossils of Ardipithecus ramidus, a hominid species that lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia, has topped Science's list of this year's most significant s ...
Study reveals chemo's toxicity to brain, possible treatment
Dec 17, 2009 |
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Researchers have developed a novel animal model showing that four commonly used chemotherapy drugs disrupt the birth of new brain cells, and that the condition could be partially reversed with the growth factor IGF-1.
Breakthrough on causes of inflammatory bowel disease
Dec 17, 2009 |
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New research by the University of Adelaide could help explain why some people are more prone to Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis and other autoimmune diseases.
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