NCERT Class 9 Science The Fundamental Unit Of Life

THE FUNDAMENTAL UNIT OF LIFE

While examining a thin slice of cork, Robert Hooke saw that the cork resembled the structure of a honeycomb consisting of many little compartments. Cork is a substance which comes from the bark of a tree. This was in the year 1665 when Hooke made this chance observation through a self-designed microscope. Robert Hooke called these boxes cells. Cell is a Latin word for ‘a little room’.

This may seem to be a very small and insignificant incident but it is very important in the history of science. This was the very first time that someone had observed that living things appear to consist of separate units. The use of the word ‘cell’ to describe these units is used till this day in biology. Let us find out about cells.

5.1 What are Living Organisms Made Up of ?

Activity ______________ 5.1

• Let us take a small piece from an onion bulb. With the help of a pair of forceps, we can peel off the skin (called epidermis) from the concave side (inner layer) of the onion. This layer can be put immediately in a watch-glass containing water. This will prevent the peel from getting folded or getting dry. What do we do with this peel?

• Let us take a glass slide, put a drop of water on it and transfer a small piece of the peel from the watch glass to the slide. Make sure that the peel is perfectly flat on the slide. A thin camel hair paintbrush might be necessary to help transfer the peel. Now we put a drop of iodine solution on this piece followed by a cover slip. Take care to avoid air bubbles while putting the cover slip with the help of a mounting needle. Ask your teacher for help. We have prepared a temporary mount of onion peel. We can observe this slide under low power followed by high powers of a compound microscope. Fig. 5.1: Compound microscope What do we observe as we look through the lens? Can we draw the structures that we are able to see through the microscope, on an observation sheet? Does it look like We can try preparing temporary mounts of peels of onions of different sizes. What do we observe? Do we see similar structures or different structures? What are these structures?

These structures look similar to each other. Together they form a big structure like an onion bulb! We find from this activity thatonion bulbs of different sizes have similar small structures visible under a microscope. The cells of the onion peel will all look the same, regardless of the size of the onion they came from.

These small structures that we see are the basic building units of the onion bulb. These structures are called cells. Not only onions, but all organisms that we observe around are made up of cells. However, there are also single cells that live on their own. The invention of magnifying lenses led to the discovery of the microscopic world. It is now known that a single cell may constitute a whole organism as in Amoeba

Chlamydomonas, Paramoecium and bacteria. These organisms are called unicellular organisms (uni = single). On the other hand, many cells group together in a single body and assume different functions in it to form various body parts in multicellular organisms (multi = many) such as some fungi, plants and animals. Can we find out names of some more unicellular organisms? Every multi-cellular organism has come from a single cell. How? Cells divide to produce cells of their own kind. All cells thus come from pre-existing cells.

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