1.

You and your friend are once again in your garage messing around with a high powered electron
microscope. You want to examine a sample of living cells that your friend brought over. She
doesn’t know what the cells are and you both hope that by using the microscope to study its
features, you can come up with a tentative identification. Here is what you observe, starting
with your view outside of the cell and moving into its interior:
- The cells have a long, thin, corkscrew shape
- two flagella at one end
- a cell wall
- a cell membrane
- cytoplasm
- some free-floating ribosomes
- a chaotic tangle of free-floating DNA at the center

Based on these observations, what kind of living thing are these cells? Is it a prokaryotic or eukaryotic
cell? What function do the flagella serve?

2. You are a world-renowned biochemist, and your current research project involves tracking the
path a specific protein takes from its creation to eventual secretion from a cell. You have
designed a glowing tag that automatically attaches to the protein as its being built, and this tag
lets you observe where the protein travels in the cell with a microscope. This protein is large
and complicated, so you already know it is incapable of diffusing out through the cell membrane
passively. You apply your tag, and observe.

When the tag first attaches to the protein while its being built, which organelle is involved? This
organelle received instructions to build the protein from somewhere, what molecule carried
those instruction and where did the instructions come from? Once built, the protein travels
around the cell while being transported to where it needs to go, what are two organelles might
be involved in this process? Finally, when its time for the protein to leave the cell, how does the
cell excrete it?

3. You and your friend are doing some microscope work at school and so don’t have access to your
garage electron microscope. Unfortunately, you must use the publicly funded compound light
microscopes that the school provides to observe some slides. Your friend thinks this is all
dreadfully boring, so they are peppering you with questions while you do all the work! Who
could imagine such a horrible scenario!? You are truly a good friend, though, so you dutifully
answer them.
- While looking at a slide of your own cheek cells, they ask “Why are these blue again?”
- While looking at a slide you made of onion skin, they ask “What are all those rectangles?”
- While looking at a slide of some man’s blood from 1969, they ask “What are the red circles?”
- While looking at a slide of a sexually transmitted bacteria, they ask “Wait, where’s the nucleus?”
- While looking at a slide of pond water, they ask “Whoa, how is that little thing swimming?”
4. Osmosis Jones, everyone’s favorite unicellular hero, is named after a type of cellular transport.
You are a television writer tasked with coming up with a gritty reboot of the Osmosis Jones
franchise because surveys have shown that teenagers have an extreme desire for more cell-
transport-based characters and stories. You are the only writer on the team who paid attention
in high school biology, so it falls to you to create a few more heroes to accompany Osmosis
Jones on this new adventure.

First, you must explain that Osmosis Jones is based off the process of osmosis and what that
means. Then, you need to name two new cell transport heroes, and describe the processes that
their names are based on.

(EXTRA CREDIT) Instead of naming only two new heroes, you decide to create personas for ALL
the types of cell transport, naming them and describing the processes after which they are
named. You even come up with a relevant super-group title, a la The Avengers or Justice League.