114 pointsby mailyk8 hours ago14 comments
  • dennyabraham31 minutes ago
    Aside from the anthropocentric view that cells are relatively small because we are made of many of them, the increases in size of lifeforms past that of individual cells is a matter of exceeding thermodynamic and informational limits. I highly recommend the book _The Vital Question_ as an intro to the systemic view of this kind of biological complexification
  • why_at6 hours ago
    I've recently gotten into microscopy as a hobby and comparing the relative size of microbes is really interesting. There are entire animals (tardigrades for one) which can be smaller than some single celled organisms.

    There are even single celled organisms which will prey upon and eat multicellular animals.

  • Terr_7 hours ago
    Reminds me of: "Gravity plays a role in keeping cells small" [0]

    [0] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2013/10/24/gravity-plays-role...

  • Imnimo7 hours ago
    This reminds me also of this paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1115585109

    "The allocation of all metabolic resources to maintenance purposes limits the size of the smallest prokaryotes and largest unicellular eukaryotes, whereas an inability to meet the ever-increasing biosynthesis rates limits the largest prokaryotes and smallest unicellular eukaryotes. Metabolic constraints for larger eukaryotes are relieved by alternative reproductive strategies and multicellularity."

  • ablob6 hours ago
    I feel like keeping the amount of molecules the same within the simulation needs to be justified. How would it look like if the average amount of molecule was the same across a um?
    • NuclearPMan hour ago
      What does amount of molecule mean?
  • chasil8 hours ago
    • DaveSchmindel8 hours ago
      > Cell sizes are not fixed, however, even within a single species. Cells often swell as they increase their production of proteins and metabolites in preparation for division. This is in line with biology’s only rule: namely, there are exceptions to every rule!

      > Case in point: a giant bacterium called Thiomargarita magnifica can extend about one centimeter in length, so large that it can be seen by the naked eye. It does so by breaking the surface area-to-volume rule, filling between 65–80 percent of its internal volume with an empty vacuole. In other words, it pushes most of its molecules to the cell periphery, thus shortening diffusion distances.

      There is also a captioned image of bubble algae in the post.

      • cwmoore6 hours ago
        Interesting topology. How empty is the vacuole?
        • trumpdong2 hours ago
          empty in terms of normal cell components, apparently it stores relatively huge amounts of nitrates that are a necessary energy source for it
      • vasco5 hours ago
        > This is in line with biology’s only rule: namely, there are exceptions to every rule!

        Nice paradox

    • teravor5 hours ago

          > The entire cell contains several cytoplasmic domains, with each domain having a nucleus and a few chloroplasts.
      
      it reinvented being multi-cellular
      • api3 hours ago
        It uses container based virtualization under a single host kernel instead of VM based virtualization.
    • reubenswartz2 hours ago
      These both feature large central vacuoles, lending support the thesis of the article that the cubic growth in volume outstrips the quadratic increase in surface area for transferring nutrients and waste across the cell membrane.
    • OrderlyTiamat7 hours ago
      relatedly, foraminifera are single cellular organisms that can grow up to 20 cm! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophyophorea
    • ssivark7 hours ago
      Isn't the ovum supposed to be a single cell? Eggs of various species can be substantially larger than this.
      • lmm4 hours ago
        Yes. I remember reading that Ostrich eggs are the largest single cells (in terms of mass/volume; Blue Whale nerve cells are longer).
        • 3 hours ago
          undefined
    • embedding-shape8 hours ago
      Those still seem kind of small? Why not the size of an mature olive tree for example? I'm guessing the article may answer this, haven't gotten that far yet.
      • malfist7 hours ago
        When they invade your saltwater aquarium, you won't think they're small. They can get up just slightly larger than a marble
    • acheron5 hours ago
      There’s also the one that almost ate the Enterprise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immunity_Syndrome_(Star_Tr...
    • AgentMasterRace6 hours ago
      Exactly
    • MagicMoonlight7 hours ago
      [dead]
  • kayo_202110308 hours ago
    > A simplistic answer is that evolution has made each cell the size best suited to its function.

    Yeah. That's probably it. Really, it probably is the right answer.

    • fluoridation7 hours ago
      That just kicks the can forward one step. What parameters control the optimal size of a given cell?
      • teravor5 hours ago
        there is likely evolutionary pressure against large cell size (selfish genes; larger cell takes energy away from replication, provides more opportunity for infiltration by other genes, fewer gene backups in other cells, etc) while occupying a niche puts pressure to be a certain size. it lands somewhere in the middle.
    • taneq6 hours ago
      Why are things the way they are? Because it works better. Simple, really. :D
  • socalgal28 hours ago
    Cells are small? compared to what? An ostrich egg is a single cell
    • bilsbie8 hours ago
      I never bought into the egg thing. There’s clearly a distinct cell in the center that’s going to divide and grow inside the egg. The egg itself isn’t undergoing mitosis.
      • al_borland7 hours ago
        I had to go look this up, as I had heard the egg thing my whole life and just accepted it.

        It turns out the oocyte is the single cell inside the egg, which for birds is significantly larger than a typical cell. So in that respect, the cell in a bird egg is very large. However, compared to the egg itself, it's tiny. The yolk and whites in the egg are all to provide nutrients as it grows, if fertilized.

      • saulpw7 hours ago
        The yolk is an energy/vitamin source, not a 'cell'. The division happens outside the yolk.

        From Wikipedia:

        > The yolk is not living cell material like protoplasm, but largely passive material

      • ErroneousBosh7 hours ago
        One of the fascinating things about biology I think is this - that if the cells of your body were the size of an egg, they'd be way, way too big and you'd probably die.
        • trumpdong2 hours ago
          I also find it interesting that if your spleen were to go prompt critical, it would irradiate you and you'd probably die. That is my favorite fact about nuclear physics.
    • graypegg8 hours ago
      I don't know for sure here, but isn't the ostrich IN the egg a multicellular animal? I would assume the first point where the egg contains anything that will become the ostrich, mitosis is happening to make more ostrich cells. I'm assuming there's always cell walls and nucleuses every step of the way here, and the egg and ostrich are never just one big cell.

      I could be off base here though, I'm really channeling grade 9 bio class from decades ago!

      • knappa8 hours ago
        Unfertilized bird eggs are single cells, fertilized eggs should be multicellular by the time they are laid.
      • otherme1238 hours ago
        The trick is that the egg is a ball with one small cell (the ovum) that happens to have also a huge reservoir of food for the future ostrich. There is a moment when there is only once cell in the egg, just after the fussion of the ovum and the sperm cell.
      • limbero8 hours ago
        You're correct, but only for fertilized eggs. Unfertilized eggs are single cells.
        • devilbunny2 hours ago
          Surrounded by a bunch of stuff that isn’t the ovum. “There is at most one cell in an unfertilized bird egg” is not the same as “an unfertilized bird egg is one cell and nothing more”.
    • jackmalpo8 hours ago
      skeletal muscle cells can be many cm in length
      • otherme1237 hours ago
        A neuron can be more than 1 meter long in humans, more than 20 meter in a whale.
  • limbero8 hours ago
    Nitpick maybe, but I don't think oocytes are the largest cells, it pretty much has to be some sort of neuron. A sensory neuron for eg. someplace in the foot will be almost as long as the person is tall, and even if the neuron is extremely thin, it's gotta beat the oocyte for volume.
    • hatthew7 hours ago
      Some back of the envelope math says this is true. A conservative estimate for the size of an alpha motor neuron axon is 10μm diameter and 1m long, which already puts it over an order of magnitude larger than the 4,000,000µm³ oocyte quoted in the article.
    • CrazyStat5 hours ago
      Giraffes neurons can be up to 15 feet long. Blue whales are speculated to have neurons up to 100 feet long, though they've never been directly observed (dissected).
    • Kaliboy3 hours ago
      But neurons are electrical no? I suppose maybe that's why they're not in the comparison.

      Or does that work with diffusion too?

  • gilleain8 hours ago
    Surface area to volume ratio?
    • dmd8 hours ago
      That's literally the first thing in the article.
      • gilleain7 hours ago
        You got me. Usually I read them.

        edit: Huh. Actually not a bad read. It even mentions ' On Growth and Form' which is interesting, if outdated. There are more modern texts like 'Shapes', 'Flow', and 'Branches' by Philip J Ball.

  • nxy2 hours ago
    Perhaps cells are small in the first place is for efficiency. It's more efficient to perform a set of tasks with trillions of these cells in unison than one big blob.
  • firefax4 hours ago
    maybe god is small too?
  • BurningFrog3 hours ago
    Cells are small compared to humans because we're made up by around 3×10¹³ cells.