Awk Bio [biology-NYA]

Awk Bio

Hum… they say that you have to “use a clean toothpick to scrape off some cells inside your cheek skin” and then “depose the cells on the microscope slide for further observation”. Yeah, it’s a bio lab – a bloody murderous one. You don’t want to do that; you wear braces. But mostly, you don’t want to risk stabbing your cheeks and destroy the mosaic framework of you oral tissues. It might take days and large quantities of ATP to repair. Well, that is not a big deal. The real problem is you just don’t want to do it. Your nerves neither get the chemicals signal to encourage you doing it.

You ask your partner.

“K, I’ll take mine,” your partner accepts fluidly. She must have been ready for it. Maybe she has been waiting all week for her chance to look at her cells in a microscope. Or maybe her biological system has already been adapted to perform such procedure. Whichever her nerves are sending, she takes the toothpick so naturally like she has practiced it before the lab. Her myosin pulls the actin, the arm and fingers’ skeletal muscles contract, and the piece of wood enters inside of her cheek. You turn away. You don’t want to see it. But whichever way you’re turning, there is always someone else from other teams scraping cells in your field of view.

You look at the floor.

Think about how it must be at the cellular level - at one second, everyone are minding their own business, doing osmosis, synthesis, mitosis, digestion, respiration, excretion, and then a second later, a giant block of autotroph cells with hard cell wall, arrives on the surface like aliens, invades and pulls out the heterotroph cells which will be soon converted into samples. It must be chaotic, apocalyptic, doomed. But what if by some unknown mutation, you’re partner’s cell wall is harder than the aliens’ and her protein fibers in her extracellular matrix are stronger? That would not only cause some trouble for the lab, it would also mean that her cells will scrape off the wood cells, and thus cause damage to the toothpick. But chances are that this mutation would probably change her skin color and she would longtime be chased by biologists and geneticists as a subject of research.

Your partner takes out the toothpick and wipes it on the middle of the glass slide. Soon, a small drop of the heterotroph cells forms, mixed with the saliva, mucus, enzymes and some proteins, glucose and minerals from the lunch she ate maybe. Some prokaryote cells might also be present, though they would be too small to see even in a microscope. They don’t need a large space for the few intracellular organelles that they have. Because they are pro – at carrying oat, compared to you-carry-oat (eukaryote).

“Is it enough?” she asks. It’s hard to tell, since you can’t see the cells with naked eyes. If she scraped correctly, there should be no need of further scraping. But you didn’t look at her scraping, you can’t know if she did correctly or if she just licked the toothpick or she scraped off the calcium of her teeth instead.

She did not wait for your answer, since you’re taking too much time to think of it. She decides to put the toothpick back in her mouth to continue scraping. It is a sudden move; you were not expecting to see that. You turn back looking at the floor and try out best to maintain the food and gastric acid in your stomach. Think about how unfortunate and miserable the sample cells must be for they cannot return home once they are carried onto the glass slide. Unless she pities them and takes them back after the observation. Even if their collagen won’t be able to connect back to the other cells’, even if they have to perish, at least they’ll perish in where they were formed. And they can also be food for future cells, too. All people must have a certain amount of nutrition that comes from their own flesh. Probably, just by eating ordinary food, a certain amount of oral cells are pulled off and are carried into the digestive process. Thus, in some way, heterotrophs can also make their own food. But because we are not pro enough and we are not green, the food we make is not enough of our subsistence. That is why we also need substitutes – a large amount of substitutes coming from other organisms.

Thus, think that the drop of saliva, mucus and all possible components present on the glass slid is food. Likewise, what she is taking out with the toothpick is purely fresh and organic (or maybe not organic depending on what products she consumes every day) sustenance. With this idea applied to your neurons, it shouldn’t be too hard to endure the endless scrapings that surround your vision.

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time: 2 days
words: 824