amarie24

So in my first nerding & geeking out in sharing my pre-Anatomy & Physiology homework, one of the things I talked about was our cell membrane and how hard they work for us, particularly our phospholipids, which make up our cell membrane.

I’m still in the building blocks section, and this time we’ve gone inside the cell from the membrane-I just finished the cytoplasm and organelles section! Ya’ll, we got a whole city within our cells! Still staying brief:

• The word “organelle” means “little organ” and that makes sense. If you step back for a moment and look at a whole, single human being, our organs are, well…big. Our lungs, our heart, our liver, our brain, etc. are big. And we can see them, uhh…with the help of imaging equipment because it’s kinda-sorta not good if you can see those organs I listed with your bare eyes. But organelles are the organs of our cells and since our cells are teeny, tiny microscopic hardworking angels, so it stands that they need their individual organs to be just as tiny, if not tinier, than they are!

• Our “cytoplasm” is where all of our organelles hang out in their own little version of a city! The cytoplasm is made of something called “cytosol”, which is like jelly; cytosol is to cytoplasm like water is to a swimming pool.

• Our “endoplasmic reticulum (ER)” is our wittle city’s waterway canals! They give the passages so that all the things that need to move around in our cells (proteins, electrolytes, wastes, etc.) can do so and get to where they need to go.

• We have two types of ER: smooth ER & rough ER! The difference is in the fact that rough ER has ribosomes that work like a factory to make proteins, while smooth ER doesn’t.

• Our Golgi apparatus is the criminal post office disguised as stacked pancakes! Gah! That is, it’s the organelle that sorts, modifies, & ships off products like a post office…but it also looks like a bunch of stacked pancakes. So this is an important PSA: even though our Golgi apparatus looks like stacked pancakes, they are not edible. I repeat: they are not edible. The posers...the fakers...

• Our mitochondria are shaped like beans…but alas, they are also not edible. They’re our energy powerhouse and have a love affair with ATP! I found it fascinating that we humans truly constantly use energy just by breathing in oxygen, and so our mitochondrion literally work 24/7. No weekends, no holidays and most certainly no overtime pay ‘cause we gotta keep breathin’. Can we get a round of applause for these hardworking bean-shaped powerhouses?!

• Reactive oxygen species (ROS) can be fatal for us humans, but we all deal with them because they’re an unfortunate, inevitable byproduct of all the activity that goes on in our wittle cell cities. Now, see, we’re lucky because we have organelles called “peroxisomes” that oversee and control these extremely reactive, unstable fuckers tearing through our cells. Peroxisomes are our sewage treatment plants; they metabolize and detoxify things (so they’re especially tight with our liver cells) all day, every day. But I was terrified reading because unfortunately, ROS can often get beyond our peroxisomes’ control and so ROS end up damaging and even destroying our cells. Cue many scientists believing ROS is related to shit like cancer…yikes.

• Our cells even have their very own skeletons! It’s called a “cytoskeleton”! Kewl-beans!

• Our nucleus is the biggest, the top-dog of our organelles. It’s the control center that tells everyone what to do. It’s the mayor, y’know?

And that’s all for now! Onwards I go to the tissue section and I’ll return with more. I hope you all enjoyed yet again! :D