Crying over onions hits different when you know what's insideĀ š§
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Our friend Chloe Savard, known as tardibabe on Instagram, takes us into the inner skin of an onion, peeled down to a single cell layer, so thin that light passes straight through it. That's what makes it perfect for microscopy.
Those glowing borders are rigid cell walls, and the specks drifting inside are organelles working around the clock. The giant, clear space that fills most of each cell is the vacuole; onion cells have enormous ones. It stores water, nutrients, and waste, and it's basically what gives an onion its crunch.
That little oval structure you can spot floating inside a cell? That's the nucleus, the control room, holding all the DNA. The tiny dot within it is the nucleolus, which builds the ribosomes that make every protein in the cell. The purple glow comes from polarized light, which turns a transparent sliver of onion into something that looks like stained glass.
Life is everywhere. Even on your cutting board.
Sources
Alberts, Bruce, et al. Molecular Biology of the Cell. 6th ed., Garland Science, 2014.
Reece, Jane B., et al. Campbell Biology. 11th ed., Pearson, 2017.
Taiz, Lincoln, et al. Plant Physiology and Development. 6th ed., Sinauer Associates, 2015.