Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Did you know that your body is made up of millions and millions and millions of cells.
Hi I'm Janice Creneti and I'm here to talk to you about what is a somatic cell. Somatic
actually comes from the Greek word which means body. And it's the type of cell that makes
up most of you. Your hair cells, your finger nails, your skin, your organs your bones,
all those are made of cells, somatic cells. Somatic cells have forty six chromosomes that's
the number that's normal in a healthy somatic cell. Somatic cells are important because
as we've started to investigate something called cloning, it's actually important to
understand the difference between a somatic cell and what we would call a gammie or a
sex cell. Those are your *** cells and your egg cells, *** and egg come together to
create a fertilized embryo that eventually develops into a human, a cat, a dog. But the
somatic cells are the actual body cells once they differentiate, which means they now have
a specific job to do. They're a hair cell, they're an eye cell, they're a skin cell.
Well somatic cells can actually be implanted with a complete fertilized nucleus in order
to clone things like sheep and even now a dog. So somatic cells are what we would think
of as being the typical cell in your body. I'm Janice Creneti and this is what is a somatic
cell.