Lab #4Animal Cells – Human Cheek, Hair Cells and Other

Question: What structures do cells have to perform cellular functions?

Prepare Slides:
Human cheek slide:
1. Add one drop of iodine to the middle of a clean slide. Caution! Iodine will stain clothes and skin.
2. Use the flat side of a toothpick to gently scratch the inside of your cheek. DO NOT GOUGE YOUR CHEEK - you don’t need chunks of skin and you definitely don’t want to draw blood.
3. Gently touch the toothpick to the drop of dye on the slide. Your cheek cells should drift off into the dye.
4. Throw the toothpick away in garbage
5. Stand a thin glass cover slip on its edge near the drop of dye.
6. Slowly lower the other side of the cover slip until it covers the dye completely. Make sure there are no air bubbles.

1. You will create a wet mount slide of the cheek cells. Sketch the cell at two powers, low/med or med/high. Draw your cells to scale. An example below:


Low Power /
Medium Power

2. Repeat above stepone more timeso you will have two different animal cells (total of 4sketches).

3. Our microscope is not powerful enough to view all organelles in our animal cells. What parts of the cells were visible? Copy the data table into your journal and complete the table using the Insights in Biology pages 102 and 352 as a resource. Label in your sketches above.

Visible Cell Structure / Function/Definition / Biomolecule Composition (for later)

Cell Investigation Cont.

Today you looked at four types of animal cells –all of which were dead. However, most cells in your body are living and very busy.

Underneath your drawings, answer the following questions in your notebook. These should be your ideas; you don’t have to have the right answers yet…

  1. What do you think is going in inside of cells?
  1. What do they need to do that?

Compare the following types of cells (not all cells look exactly the same! Note – they are not all magnified to the same scale, so even though they look like they are different sizes, it is impossible to tell from these pictures)

Intestinal cell / Muscle cell / Red blood cells / Nerve cell (neuron)
  1. What differences do you notice?
  1. List any reasons why you think the structure is the way it is for each cell type.
  1. List 2 organelles that were NOT visible but should have been in the cheek cell.
  1. What are your initial ideas about cell function? What parts of cells do you think to serve in the breakdown of food?
  1. Refer to your list of characteristics of life (MRS. NERG). If an organism is a single cell, do you think this organism has all of these characteristics? If not, which characteristics does it not need?