Questions tagged [cell-biology]
The study of cells and their physiological properties, structure, environmental interaction, division, life cycle, and death, as well as the organelles they contain. Also known as cytology.
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What actually kills a plant that requires winter dormancy if it is kept indoors all year?
In bonsai practice, beginners will commonly purchase a juniper (often Juniperus procumbens 'Nana'), which is an outdoor tree, and keep it inside all year. The tree invariably dies. It is commonly ...
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What are these balls in meshopyll cells? [Plant biology]
Anybody knows what are these small balls? The picture was collected with a confocal fluorescence microscope. These balls have a green epifluorescence and they are in mesophyll cells of rice leaves.
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What's the difference between proliferation and diffusion when talking about changes in tumor density?
Cell proliferation and cell diffusion seem to be important quantities to estimate when trying to understand or measure tumor growth, but I don't really understand a) the difference between them or b) ...
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Does the molecules in nerve cell membrane change 100% during the life of the nerve cell?
In their lifespan nerve cells do not divide and so they stay the same. They do get damaged sometimes and require some maintenance and change their axons a bit. They also require a lot of energy so ...
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Which single substance among Potassium and Phosphate has the greatest osmotic activity in the Intracellular fluid?
My physiology textbook mentions that potassium has the greatest concentration ( 155 mEq/L ) in the Intracellular fluid and that I thought would make it the most osmotically active but the answer given ...
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Does biofilm formation hinder photosythesis?
In photosynthetic bacteria such as Cyanobacteria, Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803, the bacteria need access to both light, CO2, and water to perform photosynthesis.
However, in thick biofilm structures (e....
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Isolated mitochondria in glucose rich solution, what happens to ATP generation?
I'm taking intro to biology course this year, and I was thinking about this question.
Isolated mitochondria were placed in a glucose rich solution. (With ADP and Pi). How would this affect the ATP ...
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How to select a microscope for deep microscopy? Specifically for Deep Learning/ML model development
I am new to biology and microscopy. I am a data scientist. I am faced with a question on selecting a good microscope that enables automation of scanning the slides. And cellular object detection using ...
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"Bacteria don't have membrane-bound organelles." Are sulfur bacteria or Cyanobacteria exceptions?
Can bacteria have membrane-bound organelles?
I read this many textbooks:
Bacteria cells are simple cells that do not contain a nucleus or other membrane-bound organelles. However, they do contain ...
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How do scientists determine the nature of ions passing through a channel/carrier/pump?
The NCE (Sodium Calcium Exchanger) transports 3 Na+ inside the cell for 1 Ca2+ outside.
How did we figure this out, and other mechanisms of this sort?
If it were a protein, we could tag it with GFP. ...
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What's inside the perinuclear space?
The cell proper contains the cytoplasm in general and the cytosol in particular when referring to the fluid/gel without notable organelle.
Once we move inside the nucleus there is the nucleoplasm and ...
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Excess proteins in cells
Damaged proteins are broken down in cells by ubiquitin-proteasome pathway. Do cells experience excess of proteins? If yes, how excess proteins are taken care of?
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Why there is replication of DNA before meiosis?
It seems to me that, even without replication of DNA before meiosis, the homologous pairs can still do crossover, and then be pulled to opposite poles, directly forming 2 haploid gametes.
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What is the lifespan of Skeletal Muscle Cells?
I have read that skeletal muscle cells cannot multiply and are generally not created after early development. However, I have also read that they have a "lifespan" of 10-15 years. Could this lifespan ...
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What are the sizes of the cells that make up human hair?
The question is in the title, but I'll explain why the question arose. I'm curious about the rates that various cells in the body divide, and have found various information relating to this, but ...
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What is the essence of difference of how different chemicals affect the same receptor?
It is known that various chemicals can bind to the same receptor type, producing different effects. Be these chemicals agonists or antagonists, there are more variations in how they influence the ...
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Relation between the number of children and maternal telomere lengths
I've read multiple papers with contradictory findings. Some suggests a strong negative effect by birth-giving on telomere lengths. Others disagree. However, none of them establishes causal relations ...
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To what extent are microtubule-filaments present in astrocyte leaflets?
I have been trying to find information about whether microtubule filaments are present in the leaflets of astrocytes. A astrocyte can have quite varied morphology but many at least, have a star-like ...
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Pressure inside a cell
In this article, in the introduction 3 paragraph first line they said:
The flow of water plays a critical part in these processes. Recent
experiments suggest the pressure equilibrates within cells ...
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Has there been a measurement of a stalling force for myosin molecular motors?
For processive molecular motors like kinesin, in vitro assays have allowed to measure directly a stalling force beyond which they do not progress anymore or detach.
As far as I know, the literature ...
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T-Cell Receptor Receptor-Associated Immune Receptor Activation Motifs (ITAMs) Inconsistency
In reading the information associated with the cytoplasmic machinery of the T-Cell Receptor (TCR), the one tyrosine motif that is consistently mentioned is the receptor-associated immune receptor ...
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Ventral View VS Dorsal View in cell experiments
I am trying to understand the difference between ventral and dorsal view of "cell spreading on a substrate" experiment in this article https://rupress.org/jcb/article/205/1/83/37623/A-...
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Anyone Know What This Is?
So I don't know much about plant structure or biology in general but I found this little guy while on X10 and x40 lenses on our school microscope while looking at a leaf. I'm not sure if it's part of ...
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Is lignification within plants a reversible process? If so which factors can reverse lignification?
Lignification is an important process in plants such as trees to allow for structural rigidity. Is this process reversible by the plant and if so which factors influence this reversibility?
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Why is it possible to render fat if it's in cells?
To the casual onlooker, fat seems like a mass of yellow-white material, composed of lipids. Biologically speaking however, rather than being a large mass, it's actually divided among countless cells, ...
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What is the difference between apoptosis caused by the release of enzymes from the electron transport chain vs that from the lysosome?
I know that the mitochondria is responsible for regulating apoptosis via release of enzymes from the electron transport chain. I believe that the release of hydrolytic enzymes from a lysosome is how ...
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Do SARS-CoV-2 virus particles really travel through filopodia and "emerge from the tips"?
Watching the new University of California San Francisco video Coronavirus forces cells to produce tentacle-like structures that infect neighboring cells I saw
The growths spread out, and ...
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Is it possible to make synthetic olfactory receptors?
Are there any electronic engineering technologies that allow people to make synthetic olfactory receptor that generate electrical impulses when exposed to certain proteins or molecules? If not, what ...
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Why are Barr Bodies usually seen along the edge of the nucleus under the light microscope?
We do a typical class exercise of aceto-orsein staining of buccal epithelial cells from female students to visualize Barr bodies under the light microscope. All the illustrations and pictures in the ...
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Looking for realistic representation of angiosperm sperm cells during pollination
I've scoured Youtube, google, and a handful of my botany textbooks for a cellular-scale photo, animation, or video illustrating an angiosperm sperm cell during pollination/fertilization.
...
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What change would you expect in phospholipid orientation of the membrane if the enviornment were mostly heptane?
The external and internal environment of the cell is basically water, thus phospholipids organize themselves the way they do (bilayer). If the environment were to magically become mostly heptane, how ...
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How do molecular biologists determine biochemical pathways?
I'm new to this community, so hopefully this is the right place to ask this question.
I know my question is really general, but in all of my biology courses we are merely taught the chemical pathways ...
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What is the purpose of Prostaglandin F2-alpha and the Prostaglandin F receptor in the melatonin cell signaling pathway?
I've been doing a lot of research recently on the melatonin cell signaling pathway for an extra credit project at school. I've included an image in this post, which is a diagram of the MT1 pathway. It ...
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Condition for a genetically modified group of cell to remain and to spread?
I was wondering: when a treatment modifies a group of gene (like in gene therapy), what makes a group of cell remains?
I mean, when a cell divide itself to create new ones, if a cell was initially ...
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Can photorespiration do any good?
When CO2-levels are to low plants start to photorespirate instead of photosynthesise. This cost them losses in energy, and adds CO2 to the atmosphere instead of O2.
I wonder if the photorespiration ...
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Can immune cells be recruited to an area of inflammation, and later go on to a second?
With regards to innate or adaptive immune cells... can naive/immature cells such as neutrophils, monocytes, macrophage/dendritic cells or adaptive T-cells be recruited to an area of inflammation, for ...
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How does DNA damage increase the activity of p53?
I understand the steps leading up to the halting of the S-cdK checkpoint from there, but I can't find the mechanism by which DNA damage actually increases the activity of p53.
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How much time does it take for the naive T Cell to get activated?
Suppose a naive T cell comes in contact with an APC. How much time does it take for the T Cell to get activated and within how much time does the T cell move away from the APC due to incompatibility ...
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Question about genetic recombination
I am having some difficulty understanding a few things about genetic recombination, in part because of confusion from different diagrams in books.
First of all, I wanted to verify whether I have ...
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Is it possible to isolate cells harboring a specific DNA sequence?
Suppose on cell subpopulation harbours within its genome a specific DNA sequence that do not exist in other cell subpopulations. Is it technically possible to isolate such subpopulation ? and if yes, ...
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Why do some white blood cells have lobed nuclei?
Several types of white blood cells (eg Neutrophils) have lobed nuclei. Is this for a functional reason? I have seen people refer to structural differences in the lobes as indicative of problems, but ...
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L-tryptophan in mammalian cell culture
Why must the concentration of L-tryptophan be kept to a relatively low level when culturing mammalian cells?
It's an essential amino acid, so I cannot fathom why low concentrations as opposed to ...
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What Chemical Trigger Causes Ectomycorrhiza To Change From Asexual To Sexual?
I want to know the trigger behind the change of asexual to sexual ectomycorrhiza when symbiosis with a tree root is formed. As ectomycorrhiza attaches itself to a root, it forms a relationship wherein ...
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Can I leave BL21(DE3) cells in room temperature?
I am preparing competent cells, and I finished inoculating a single colony in SOB. It has been incubating at 37 degrees Celsius for almost 16 hours since, and it's getting very late where I live. I ...
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How to prevent e coli from clumping (for FACS)?
I'm performing FACS on e coli, but the cells are clumping together so each event is multiple cells.
I ran a control where I had one flask of e coli expressing GFP, and one flask expressing RFP. Run ...
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Can someone explain the color-changing unit (CCU) to me?
I've been physically carrying out serial tenfold dilutions on samples of Ureaplasma to work out the color-changing units (CCU).
As a definition, the CCU is the highest dilution at which there is a ...
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Microscopy Book Suggestions
I've learned programming through great book recommendations; many from the Stack Exchange series of sites. I'm hoping to take this approach in order to gain a fundamental understanding of how ...
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Protecting linear ssDNA inside a yeast cell
This is kind of a multi-part question :)
Basically, I want a linear single-stranded polydeoxynucleotide to exist inside an S. cerevisiae cell cytoplasm for a long time without being digested. As far ...
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conduction in unmyelinated axons
(Not a specialist here) Several questions touch the voltage propagation along an unmyelinated axon, but I'd like to focus on the following.
How fast does the voltage of a sub-threshold perturbation ...
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What is the current scientific consensus regarding the relationship between Eukaryotes and Archaea?
In the traditional 3-domain system, the domains Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryota are all distinct from one another, with the latter 2 usually being sister-groups in a clade.
However recent evidence ...
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