The procedure involves three steps

  1. Step One
  2. Step Two
  3. Step Three ale of hay and every single stalk of corn it’s even used to make paper and cardboard boxes so without the cell wall plants would be a lot less structurally sound and much more wilting and droopy

It’s 1665 and scientist Robert Hook has just used his newly invented light microscope to look at a thin slice of pork up close. He was stunned to see that the tree bark was made up of thousands of tiny compartments which he named cells, after the little rooms that monks live in. He feverishly wrote in his book Micrographia: “They were indeed the first microscopical pores I ever saw and perhaps that were ever seen for I had not met with any writer or person that had made any mention of them before this.” Did he just discover cells? From that point on, scientists have never stopped studying them. Cells are a fundamental unit of all life on Earth that help us understand everything from the teeniest microbes to the blubberiest whales. But botanists won’t let you forget that the first cell ever discovered was from a plant and hundreds of years later we’ve learned more about these things and about ourselves than Robert Hook could have ever imagined.

Plant and animal cells actually have a lot of similarities. First off, both plant and animal cells are surrounded by a barrier called a cell membrane that allows the cell to decide what kind of molecules it wants to let in or out and both types of cells manufacture lots of proteins using ribosomes, which are the little granules spread throughout the cell like the sprinkles in a Funfetti cake. Those proteins have tons of different responsibilities and both animals and plants like helping with immunity from disease and transporting nutrients. Plant and animals are also both eukaryotic organisms, meaning our cells contain organelles. Organelles are functional units of the cell just like organs are the functional units of our bodies like hearts and brains for us and stems and leaves for plants.

One key organelle that plant and animal cells share is the nucleus, the home of all our DNA. The nucleus uses the information stored in the DNA to tell the other parts of the cell what to do, it’s like the coach of a sportball team. We can’t forget mitochondria, the kidney beam shaped sites of cellular respiration in both plants and animal cells. When we say respiration here, we don’t mean the way humans breathe using our lungs. Cellular respiration is the process by which chemical energy stored in sugars is converted to energy molecules that fuel life’s essential processes. So even though animals and plants get food in different ways, they all still have to perform respiration to convert their food to usable energy.

But there are some pretty major differences between plant and animal cells. For one thing, plant cells contain chloroplasts, which are organelles that convert carbon dioxide gas from the air into sugars using energy from the Sun, AKA photosynthesis. You won’t find chloroplasts in animals, they’re more of a plant thing. Vacuoles are also more of a plant thing, they’re fluid-filled organelles that maintain pressure in the plant cell to keep the plant from wilting. While some animal cells have small ones, as much as 90 percent of a plant cell’s volume can be taken up by the vacuole. Vacuoles help cells grow, store proteins and sugars, and often contain colored pigments, so we have them to thank for the pretty pink petals on our roses. Plant cells are also surrounded by a thick cell wall made of cellulose, which is a carbon-containing molecule that is super abundant here on Earth.