• Question: What is the most interesting thing you know about cells?

    Asked by anon-251393 to Alex on 22 Apr 2020.
    • Photo: Alex Agrotis

      Alex Agrotis answered on 22 Apr 2020:

      Did you know that cells eat themselves when they are hungry?

      The cell is mainly made up of fats, carbohydrates, protein and nucleic acid (DNA/RNA). Cells need a constant supply of building blocks to make these components in order to replace anything that is lost or damaged, or to grow and divide into new cells.
      Usually these building blocks will originate from outside the cell – from our diet. Cells can die quickly if they don’t get this supply, for example during starvation.

      Luckily, most cells have the capability of digesting their own contents to provide the building blocks to survive starvation – at least for a bit longer. Scientists call this process ‘autophagy’ which translates from Greek as ‘self-eating’. I like to think of it as a superpower! It doesn’t just act during starvation, but also happens at a low level normally to keep cells healthy and free of damage.

      I studied autophagy for my PhD, so I am probably a little bit biased! I would often watch autophagy happening in cells growing in a dish under a microscope. Within minutes of mimicking starvation, hundreds of tiny dots appear throughout the cell, and each dot is an ‘autophagosome’ – basically a vesicle (bubble) where autophagy is taking place.

      If you are interested to know more about autophagy, here is a BBC article from a few years ago about the 2016 Nobel Prize: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-37540927

Comments

  • Photo: Freya

    Freya commented on :

    That there is so little empty space in side them. When you learn about processes in cells, like glycolysis or the TCA cycle, it’s easy to imagine that they happen in a nice ordered space, with one enzyme passing substrate to the next one in the queue like a production line. But there is just so much metabolism happening inside the average cell, all at once, and so many molecules moving around in the cytoplasm. It’s not neat and tidy at all – and quite mind-boggling to think that so much complicated biochemistry actually gets to happen in there. Here’s a short animation that some researchers made, showing all the proteins inside a bacterial cell jostling against each other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fobDHHl11c