Definition of Cell (biology)

The cell is the structural and functional unit of all known living organisms. It is the smallest unit of an organism that is classified as living, and is sometimes called the building block of life. Some organisms, such as bacteria, are unicellular (consist of a single cell). Other organisms, such as humans, are multicellular. (Humans have an estimated 100 trillion or 10¹⁴ cells; a typical cell size is 10 µm; a typical cell mass is 1 nanogram.) The largest known cell is an ostrich egg. In 1837 before the final cell theory was developed, a Czech Jan Evangelista Purkyňe observed small "granules" while looking at the plant tissue through a microscope. The cell theory, first developed in 1839 by Matthias Jakob Schleiden and Theodor Schwann, states that all organisms are composed of one or more cells. All cells come from preexisting cells. Vital functions of an organism occur within cells, and all cells contain the hereditary information necessary for regulating cell functions and for transmitting information to the next generation of cells.

Cell biology (also called cellular biology or formerly cytology, from the Greek kytos, "container") is an academic discipline that studies cells. This includes their physiological properties, their structure, the organelles they contain, interactions with their environment, their life cycle, division and death. This is done both on a microscopic and molecular level. Cell biology research extends to both the great diversity of single-celled organisms like bacteria and the many specialized cells in multicellular organisms like humans.