My own cheek cells

Mar 28, 2015 • 10:01 PM UTC

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140x Magnification

Microorganisms

Manu Prakash

I am a faculty at Stanford and run the Prakash Lab at Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Foldscope community is at the heart of our Frugal Science movement - and I can not tell you how proud I am of this community and grassroots movement. Find our work here: http://prakashlab.stanford.edu

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We all know we are made out of cells. Several trillion cells to be more accurate. So we loose cells every day – mostly skin cells. When you brush, you loose a lot of cells. If you take your finger and rub inside your mouth; you would have gathered hundreds or thousands of cells from the surface of your mouth. These cells lining most parts of our body are termed “epithelial cells” and form one of the four main category of cells (others being muscle cells, connective tissue and nervous tissue). One of the main role of “epithelial cells” is to keep foreign things outside by forming a nice tight sheet of cells. To make a sheet; they are mostly flat cells and connect with each other nicely to form a single layer. If you have seen a mosaic of tiles; you know what I mean.
Method:
1. To see some of my own cells (after all, I am just a collection of cells); I just took my thumb and rubbed inside my mouth for 20 seconds.
2. I took the slime/saliva that I had on my finger and put that on a glass slide and put it inside a Foldscope 140X and connected my iPhone5 with the same.
3. I was very excited; so you will hear my voice in the background.
4. We observed a lot more than I had bargained for – specially lots of things that would qualify as bacteria (specially some motile bacteria). Secondly I found a big crystal (can’t say what that was); and also some black speckles. I wonder if i had coffee a few minutes ago and my mouth was coated with coffee particles (coffee is brown because of tiny colloidal particles – I will post that some other time).

Enjoy the video – I call this video “this is me” since the tiny nuclei you see in this video has all the information it needed to make “me” – it’s just beautiful to see these cells.
cheers
manu