Core curriculum - Cell biology: taxonomy

 

Most of the biology we need to learn can be treated orthogonal to the mathematics, whereas the mathematics underlies all the physics and engineering to come. As a change of pace, then, I'm going to start covering some of the biology so I can jump back and forth between two separate tracks. One track will involve Mathematics, then Physics, then Engineering, the other will be Cell Biology, Anatomy, Physiology and then Biochemistry.

 

Let's begin with a simple overview of cell structure:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xe1s65IH0w

The owner prohibits embedding this video in other media so you'll have to click through the link to watch.

Next, a little more detail on what's in a typical mammalian cell:

All well and good, but we are primarily interested in the types of cells found in neural tissue, whether central nervous system (CNS) or peripheral nervous system (PNS):

A little more taxonomy before we get into the details of neurons and astrocytes. In this video, we start to encounter the chemical and electrical signaling properties in cells, something we will get into in more detail in a later post. Still, it's timely to introduce the concepts.

As we move towards the neural underpinnings of fMRI signals, we need to know a lot more about neurons and astrocytes. Let's do neurons first.

While this next video repeats a lot of what you've already seen, there is enough unique information to make it worth watching.

Finally, a little more taxonomy that relates types of neurons to parts of the body, something that could be very important for fMRI when we are considering an entire organism.

To conclude this introduction to cell biology and types of neural cells, let's look at glial cells in more detail.

 Another simple introduction, to reinforce the main points:

And a nice review to wrap up.

We will look far more closely at astrocytes in a later video, once we've learned more about blood flow and control. For now, just remember that those astrocyte end feet are going to be extremely important for the neurovascular origin of fMRI signals.

 

That will do for this primer. The next post in this series will concern the resting and action potentials, signaling and neurotransmission.

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