Onion Cells- LGP '26_B4_D1
Jun 12, 2026 • 1:40 PM UTC
India
340x Magnification
Plants
Aarya Agarwal
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My drawing of the onion cells under different magnifications.
One thing you should know about me before reading this blog is that I despise onions! I really can't stand them, but after the first day of the microcosm course, I seem to find them a bit more tolerable! Who would've thought!
After spending some time looking at the fern rhizome and getting used to the foldscope, we moved on to observing onion cells. As soon as I saw the professor chopping up a literal onion and handing us the pieces, I smiled at the crude nature of our experiment, and eagerly grabbed my piece to begin preparing the slide!
However, using the foldscope was still a challenge. Even after having some practice with it, focusing the image wasn't easy, and a lot of the times we didn't know what it was we were looking at. Sometimes everything looked blurry, and other times I would lose the sample completely when switching magnifications. Finding the right lighting was also surprisingly difficult. More than once, I thought I had a perfect view, but as soon as I held my camera lens up to it, the once clear image magically lost resolution!
After a lot of adjusting and refocusing, I finally managed to get a clear image. It was amazing to see how different the onion looked under magnification. What seemed like a thin, transparent layer suddenly became a pattern of neatly arranged cells. They looked almost like tiny rectangular bricks placed side by side.
At lower magnifications, I could see the general arrangement of the cells. As I increased the magnification, the cell walls became much clearer and the individual cells stood out more distinctly. It was strange to think that something so ordinary contained such organised structures that are impossible to see with the naked eye.
One thing I really enjoyed about this course was drawing the cells, which forced me to pay closer attention to their shapes and arrangement. It made me notice details that I probably would have missed otherwise.
Although using the Foldscope was sometimes frustrating, it was also part of the fun. it was really rewarding each time our efforts and anxieties paid off, and when after a ton of focussing and prancing around the classroom to find that perfect light source we suddenly found the perfect image or noticed the most astonishing little detail. Every time the image finally came into focus, it felt like discovering something new. By the end of the session, I felt much more confident using the foldscope and curious about the microscopic world around me.
This was certainly one onion that didn't make me cry!!
One thing you should know about me before reading this blog is that I despise onions! I really can't stand them, but after the first day of the microcosm course, I seem to find them a bit more tolerable! Who would've thought!
After spending some time looking at the fern rhizome and getting used to the foldscope, we moved on to observing onion cells. As soon as I saw the professor chopping up a literal onion and handing us the pieces, I smiled at the crude nature of our experiment, and eagerly grabbed my piece to begin preparing the slide!
However, using the foldscope was still a challenge. Even after having some practice with it, focusing the image wasn't easy, and a lot of the times we didn't know what it was we were looking at. Sometimes everything looked blurry, and other times I would lose the sample completely when switching magnifications. Finding the right lighting was also surprisingly difficult. More than once, I thought I had a perfect view, but as soon as I held my camera lens up to it, the once clear image magically lost resolution!
After a lot of adjusting and refocusing, I finally managed to get a clear image. It was amazing to see how different the onion looked under magnification. What seemed like a thin, transparent layer suddenly became a pattern of neatly arranged cells. They looked almost like tiny rectangular bricks placed side by side.
At lower magnifications, I could see the general arrangement of the cells. As I increased the magnification, the cell walls became much clearer and the individual cells stood out more distinctly. It was strange to think that something so ordinary contained such organised structures that are impossible to see with the naked eye.
One thing I really enjoyed about this course was drawing the cells, which forced me to pay closer attention to their shapes and arrangement. It made me notice details that I probably would have missed otherwise.
Although using the Foldscope was sometimes frustrating, it was also part of the fun. it was really rewarding each time our efforts and anxieties paid off, and when after a ton of focussing and prancing around the classroom to find that perfect light source we suddenly found the perfect image or noticed the most astonishing little detail. Every time the image finally came into focus, it felt like discovering something new. By the end of the session, I felt much more confident using the foldscope and curious about the microscopic world around me.
This was certainly one onion that didn't make me cry!!
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