How do we look inside the cell?

Question

My sister is in 9th grade biology and her teacher avoided answering the question of how we actually study the inside of a cell. I haven't taken biology in a while but I'd like to give her an answer. \n\nCan someone roughly summarize how we actually learn about what goes on inside a cell? Just mentioning a few of the most common or used techniques would be fine. \n\nNote: I hope this isn't a bad question. It's a bit vague. But I didn't want to leave her without a decent answer.

Answer 1

1. Light Microscopy--specimens are stained to highlight particular organelles. Light microscopes can also be used to examine living tissue and cells.
2. Scanning electron microscopy--especially useful for the cell's interior--disadvantage--SEM can only examine nonliving specimens.
3. Nomarski Interference microscopy
4. Confocal microscopy--uses lasers and special fluorescent dyes that are organelle or chemically specific
5. Fluorescent microscopy
6. Phase contrast microscopy

Answer 2

Hello!

This is a really good question to ask and is important for context for those who are more visual learners. I'll start with the techniques used first before moving into what we actually look like!

Generally the first thing is there has been a lot of work to determine the mechanisms of action. A good way to think of this is we have a really tiny engine, and we're trying to determine how it works by breaking pieces of it and seeing what happens. Or replacing pieces and seeing what happens. Through years of research like this we have a pretty good idea of how or why a lot of what is happening inside the cell occurs. The way we visualize the sample is using what's called protein crystallography. This simply means we take the protein we're interested in and grow small crystals of them, sort of like making a complicated thing of rock candy. These we can take specialized X-ray scans of and determine the actual 3-D structure of a protein.

This field has been immensely helpful for us to understand how pieces fit together inside a cell. Using a mixture of crystallography and computer simulations people have started to piece together what is going on inside a cell. Describing this is impossible, and why your teacher skipped over it. I've linked a number of youtube videos below. These will give you a feeling for what is going on inside a cell and how it looks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyUtbn0O5Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_tYrnv_o6A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpHaxzroYxg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfB8vQokr0Q

If you have questions or want these explained in greater detail please let me know!

CJ