The smallest unit that counts as alive — membranes, organelles, the cytoskeleton, and the division cycle that copies all of it.
11 topics · 10 curated works
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Update of the 1972 Singer-Nicolson Fluid-Mosaic Model of Membrane Structure
Garth L. Nicolson · 2013
The model's co-author revisits the fluid mosaic picture four decades on, arguing lipid rafts and restricted protein mobility refine rather than…
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Behavior in Successive Nuclear Divisions of a Chromosome Broken at Meiosis
Barbara McClintock · 1938
Follows a single broken maize chromosome through meiosis and mitosis and shows a self-perpetuating breakage-fusion-bridge cycle, revealing that…
+8 more at this level
10 works
Garth L. Nicolson
The model's co-author revisits the fluid mosaic picture four decades on, arguing lipid rafts and restricted protein mobility refine rather than overturn the original proposal that membranes are a fluid sea of lipid studded with floating proteins.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Barbara McClintock
Follows a single broken maize chromosome through meiosis and mitosis and shows a self-perpetuating breakage-fusion-bridge cycle, revealing that chromosome behaviour itself drives certain inheritance patterns.
link checked 17 Sept 2026G. D. Clark-Walker & A. W. Linnane
Compares respiratory-deficient yeast mutants to chloramphenicol-inhibited wild-type cells to argue mitochondria are built by two cooperating genetic systems, one inside the organelle and one in the nucleus.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Kerr, Andrew Wyllie & Alastair Currie
Names and characterises a distinct, controlled form of cell death separate from necrosis, arguing it is a normal regulatory process rather than pathology.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Earl W. Sutherland
Argues that many hormones act not directly but by triggering production of a common intracellular second messenger, cyclic AMP, inside the target cell.
link checked 17 Sept 2026George E. Palade
Traces a secreted protein's route through the endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus and secretory vesicles, establishing the cell's internal address system for newly made proteins.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ronald D. Vale, Thomas S. Reese & Michael P. Sheetz
Identifies a motor protein distinct from myosin that walks along microtubules using ATP, providing the mechanism behind directed transport inside the cell.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Daniel J. Lew & Steven I. Reed
Shows budding yeast delay entry into mitosis when bud formation is blocked, evidence for a checkpoint that ties progress through the cell cycle to successful completion of morphogenesis, not just DNA replication.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Kitai Kim et al.
Shows iPS cells retain a residual epigenetic signature of the tissue they were reprogrammed from, meaning reprogramming to pluripotency is not always complete and the cell's origin can still shape what it becomes.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Zoe L. Watson et al.
Resolves the bacterial ribosome at near-atomic detail, sharp enough to place individual water molecules and modified bases, redrawing the picture of the machine that translates every protein in the cell.
link checked 17 Sept 2026