Blueprints, Power Plants, and Scaffolding

What am I looking at?

This image shows three mouse fibroblast cells (that is, from connective tissue) with three key cellular structures labeled in different colors. The nuclei are blue (1), the mitochondria are green (2), and the actin protein within the cytoskeleton is red (3).

Biology in the background

Unlike prokaryotic cells, all eukaryotic cells have nuclei. Nuclei house most of a cell’s genetic information – much of it in the form of DNA – making a nucleus a sort of blueprint for building future cells.

Mitochondria are the power plants of a cell. They generate energy through a process called cellular respiration. This energy is most often stored in a molecule called adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is the fuel for many cellular processes.

The cytoskeleton is like scaffolding for the cell – giving it its shape, allowing it to move in its environment, transporting molecules around the interior of the cell, and more. A cell’s cytoskeleton is composed of three main types of fibers, or filaments: actin filaments (seen here), microtubules (made from specific proteins called alpha and beta tubulin), and intermediate filaments (made from a variety of proteins).

A mouse fibroblast cell can grow to about 20 micrometers across, or roughly four times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Technique

This image was created using confocal microscopy.