• Question: please explain to me all about specialised cells

    Asked by anon-184882 to William, Rebecca, Martyna, Callum, Alice, Adam on 3 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Adam Berlie

      Adam Berlie answered on 3 Nov 2018:

      I wish I could! You need one of them life scientists.

    • Photo: Martyna Pastok

      Martyna Pastok answered on 4 Nov 2018:

      Specialised cells is a very broad area. Cells can be specialised towards different work they need to do and parts of body they are building. Cells will be different in your blood, and in your eye, in your heart, in your nail and in your stomach and bones.

    • Photo: Alice Loasby

      Alice Loasby answered on 4 Nov 2018:

      This isn’t my area at all, and is a huge topic, but I think a lot of human cells and organs start life as stem cells. They can self replicate and differentiate into other types of cells. There are many different types of stem cells that come from different parts of the body and form at different times in our lives. For example, we have embryonic stem cells that only exist at the earliest stages of development.

    • Photo: Rebecca Roddan

      Rebecca Roddan answered on 7 Nov 2018:

      This isn’t my area of expertise so I’ll explain it in the basic way I know it to be. So all the cells in your body have the same genetic material. This is coded for DNA (genes are determined by certain DNA sequences). DNA is stored in the nucleus of a cell, in chromosomes. Different cells will have different genes switched on and switched off, which overall gives the cells different characteristics.

      Examples of specialised cells would be say a red blood cell which is optimised to carry oxygen around the body or a nerve cell which is optimised to transmit electrical signals.

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